<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>pocket full of posies by MagusLibera</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23632804">pocket full of posies</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagusLibera/pseuds/MagusLibera'>MagusLibera</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>fics I wrote in quarantine as I chilled [10]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Arrow (TV 2012)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(Not by Oliver or Felicity), Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Wings, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Canon Typical Violence, Captivity, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, England 1349, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Forbidden Fruit, Forbidden Love, Graphic Description, HEA, Happy Ending, Historical Quarantine, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Love at First Sight, No Rape/Non-con, Nobility, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Oliver Queen, Quarantine and Chill Fic Drive (Arrow TV 2012), Roman Catholicism, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Starvation, The Black Death, Torture, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Wingfic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 18:55:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>44,952</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23632804</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagusLibera/pseuds/MagusLibera</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Oliver inhales sharply, the very sight of her stealing the breath from his lungs and it catches her attention. Quick as a whip, her head snaps around to face him, revealing a gaunt face. Her porcelain skin is ashen, sunken against her bones in a dreadful way that only serves to highlight her skull. Her wrists are so tiny, bones at every joint sticking out unhealthily and the massive limbs behind her look ratty and unkempt.</i><br/>  <br/>  <i>But still, in spite of all of that, Oliver can see that she is beautiful. Her high cheekbones, though exaggerated by her thinness, speak of an elegant bone structure, her bowed lips are plush and enticing, despite their pale blue shade. And her eyes… God, her eyes. They are crystalline, the bluest of blues, shining with an unspoken intelligence as she takes him in. They capture him, drawing him into her and before he knows it, he is taking a step forward.</i></p><p>Determined to uncover the Archbishop’s secrets, Oliver becomes their guardian. The girl in the catacombs, the lynchpin of all that’s happening, changes everything.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>fics I wrote in quarantine as I chilled [10]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1672840</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>111</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>128</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Quarantine and Chill Fic Drive 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. daffodil</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hi all! I think that it's time I admit to myself that I have no ability to keep an AU short and that I'm going to have about 50 WIPs at the end of the Q&amp;C fic drive, because I also have an extensive plan to continue this one.</p><p>Oh well, at least I'll have a busy summer!</p><p>The title is from the children's nursery rhyme Ring o' Ring o' Roses. Though it is debated by historians, common belief is that the rhyme is about the plague outbreaks and the line 'a pocket full of posies' supposedly refers to how people believed that disease was spread by a 'bad miasma' and would therefore carry flowers in their pockets in an attempt to ward it off. I was going to call this We All Fall Down but that didn't feel right and now the flower theme has spiralled.</p><p>This is set in England in 1349. I have, however, edited history so that King Edward I had three sons by his second wife rather than two and that the first son was Prince Robert who was granted the title of Duke of a fictional duchy called Starling. So this fic is happening in a fictional place but in a very real historical setting. There will be many historical inaccuracies though because I can :D</p><p>Anyway, this was born when I was trying to combine prompts to come up with a story and it just worked for me. So, yeah. Historical Quarantine Wingfic, let's go.</p><p>TW: In this fic, there are corrupt members of the Catholic Church. It is well documented that there are some power hungry people who take advantage of many different religions in order to elevate themselves and so this small group is a representation of some individuals who took advantage of the power that the Church had in the 14th century in a bad way.</p><p>[Edit 04/07/20 As I have started working on the second chapter of this fic, I have also made some minor changes and additions to this chapter. Nothing hugely different, but some of it will help the flow in later chapters.]</p><p>[Edit 13/04/21 The final draft of this chapter is now up and I have elaborated on what this fic is going to contain in the notes section of Chapter II, please read that as it contains some important warnings.]</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>daffodil : a symbol of new beginnings and rebirth; a gift for those one holds in high regard; to be given to the one for whom your love is unequalled, your light in the dark</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>
  <b>TRIGGER WARNING: this chapter contains a character being held in forced captivity and contains mentions of starvation and PTSD.</b>
</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>I Daffodil</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>The Slabside Monastery is one of the grandest buildings in all of Starling. Second only, perhaps, to the home of the Duke of Starling: Queen Castle, the stone walls of which witnessed the childhood of Oliver, the late Duke’s son and heir to the dukedom. Despite its holy position within Oliver’s family’s lands, this journey marks the first time that Oliver has ever seen the Monastery in person. His only prior knowledge of the place has been the descriptions he has heard from his father and peers, and he realises that he had thoroughly underestimated it. It is far larger than he had imagined, every inch of it elaborately built, the height of the architectural fashions of the late thirteenth century when it had been designed decades before Oliver had even been born.</p><p> </p><p>Where Queen Castle is a vast and strong fort-like structure, designed not just for statement but also for military defence, Slabside has an elegance that only a divine building such as itself can possess. Queen Castle was built practically, the only design features those there to show the power of the castle and those who reside within it. Slabside Monastery is designed to show the elegant holiness of those who dwell within. Climbing towers and tall spires sprout out from elaborately made, arched windows, the intricate decorations practically dripping from every surface possible. Huge oaken doors protect the inhabitants from the outside, imposing in their grandeur. They would be enough to cower any looking to gain entry, to humble even the proudest to come before them. But when Oliver and his men find themselves faced with the wooden barrier, there is no moment of pause before they swing open before him and his entourage, revealing the Archbishop of Starling awaiting his arrival.</p><p> </p><p>Ordinarily, Slabside Monastery is home only to the monks of Iron Heights, along with the select members of the clergy who have been granted permission to live there. However, in the last few months, there has been a stirring. Irregular events have been occurring, all of it stemming from the Archbishop’s sudden and unusual decision to take up semi-permanent residence there. Oliver only knows anything because he has ears everywhere, because he was looking for something. And, if he is right, he has found it in this place. This place where the Archbishop has dragged along his loyal followers to a monastery that previously held little interest to them and where he has secluded himself, neglecting his other duties in favour of whatever has captured his attention.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver has been extremely interested in these abnormalities, he has been desperately looking for a way to find out more, sending spies out to get all of the information possible. All he has been able to gather up until now has been that Slabside is almost definitely the place that he has been looking for, but he has been unable to glean anything more without a way to breach the ornate walls. And, mere days before, as if the Archbishop himself knew that Oliver was looking for a way to get in, Oliver himself received a letter, requesting that trustworthy members of the soldiers under his command travel to Slabside too, to protect the clergy’s interests there.</p><p> </p><p>Naturally, Oliver jumped on the opportunity immediately. He <em>needs</em> to know what is happening there, he has his own mission to uncover the truth of the Archbishop’s dealings. He has been looking for a way in for months, spent hours poring over reconnaissance himself, collecting all of the information that he possibly can. His closest allies have poured hours into observing the comings and goings, but to no avail. He has been unable to find what he is looking for, unable to hear so much as a whisper of what is truly happening within the monastery. All that he knows is that there is <em>something </em>happening there, and that the answers he seeks must lie deep within the gothic stone. For him, there is no choice to make. An opportunity for not just him but also his allies to enter the prestigious structure is not something that he can pass up, not when he has been searching for it for so long.</p><p> </p><p>And it also has the added benefit that he will be able to get away from home. He loves his family, he truly does, but living there again has grown less and less easy the longer that he has stayed. His relationship with his mother has been strained enough since his return, what with her constant meddling, but it has gotten to a point where her insistence upon having a degree of control over his life has started to hinder his mission and <em>that</em> is something that he cannot stand for. Not now.</p><p> </p><p>In his youth, Oliver had been something of a scoundrel. From the moment he was born, he has been entitled to some of the highest privileges that are available to an infant in his country. He is the child of Prince Robert, Duke of Starling and the Her Grace Moira, Duchess of Starling. In the moment of his birth, he had inherited his father’s title as Earl of the Glades. From the very start of his life, he has held a power that most can hardly even dream of and, unfortunately, he was never taught to respect it as a boy. He watched as his father dallied with women who were not his mother and suffered no consequences for it, he saw the way his mother behaved around those beneath their station and was led to believe that her casual disregard for them was acceptable.</p><p> </p><p>His entire childhood was a string of poor choices excused by his parents and that developed in the worst way as he entered early adulthood. He could get away with whatever he wanted, so he did. He shirked his responsibilities, he spent each night in a different woman’s bed, he spared no thought for anybody outside of his peerage aside from Raisa, his old wet nurse and the woman who had more of a hand in raising him than his own mother. Raisa was also the only one who ever tried to teach Oliver better, to show him the error in his ways. Her disappointment was the only thing that could make him feel ashamed of his careless actions. It made little difference though.</p><p> </p><p>That careless lifestyle lasted until five years ago, when the French had launched an invasion on Starling and his father had perished in the battle. Starling lies on the east coast of England, curved along the coastal borders of London and Cambridge. It is a not the widest of duchies, but it is long, spanning a significant portion of the English coastline. For the first five years of the war with France, Starling had remained relatively untarnished due to its distance from any French borders. But the longer that the war continues, the more desperate both sides become and therefore an invasion force had been sent to the less prepared Starling coastline back in Oliver’s twenty-second year. And the Duke had fallen, leaving behind a single son and heir.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver had been devastated. Unable and incapable of considering taking his father’s title and ruling the duchy from his father’s chair, he had thirsted for action. For a way to avenge his father with the blood of the Frenchmen who dared to try and hurt his family. It had been easy to get permission from his elder cousin, King Edward III, to put off his claim and let his mother govern Starling as regent so that he could first join the war efforts.</p><p> </p><p>For five years he has fought, finally learning the hardships of the real world and gaining some much-needed perspective, and he would have fought for longer. He would have stayed and fought to the last, but the choice was taken from him. As soon as the Black Death hit London, he and the rest of the men had been recalled, both sides halting their efforts as their populations have been decimated even more violently by disease than they ever had by war.</p><p>*************************</p><p>For a short time, it had been a relief to be home. To see his mother and sister healthy and unaffected by the plague. To see Raisa and know that she has been safe too. Starling has been relatively unaffected by the disease thus far, but it swept through London with a vengeance and already there have been cases spreading north, even a couple cropping up within the borders of Starling, so Oliver and his family know that it is only a matter of time before it unleashes upon their people too.</p><p> </p><p>But, regardless of the state of the country, his mother had begun to pressure him again. Trying to convince him to take up his father’s titles, to become the Duke. And Oliver knew that it would not be long before she began to remind him of his unattached state. At twenty-seven, going on twenty-eight, the fact that he is still unmarried has been worrying his mother. Even though plenty of his peers are also unmarried, thanks to their years of service. And he had been right, before he had even counted his first month home, he found his mother inviting around her many friends for visits. The most favoured Earls of the peerages of Starling had come knocking on the Queen doors, daughters in tow.</p><p> </p><p>The Lord Quentin Lance, Earl of the Ware – the smallest but closest peerage to Oliver’s father’s holdings of Queen, their home, and Castleton, their largest holding – had been first, bringing not just one but two daughters with him. Oliver grew up with the Ladies Laurel and Sara and had been known to have… relations with the both of them at times. It is no secret that Laurel is favoured by Moira for Oliver’s wife. After all, Laurel and Sara are Lord Quentin’s only heirs and the man has no male relatives fit to take his title, so whomever marries Laurel will inherit the Ware.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver had encouraged that in his youth, following his mother’s desires and focusing his more formal courting efforts on the elder Lance sister. They got along well enough, though they had little in common and their personalities could clash at times, both were willing enough to see their duties out and take pleasure in one another’s company. But Oliver could never see a future with Laurel beyond his mother’s expectations. He had been far closer to Sara as far as shared interests went, and the two had been good friends, especially when Laurel and Oliver would have a spat and he and Sara would sit and air their woes – mostly those that pertained to Laurel – to one another. It had been his relationship with Sara, and his decision to develop it beyond friendship, that had led to his final falling out with Laurel. And after his father’s death, he had been too focused on war to ever rekindle the courtship, even to appease his mother. He still has absolutely no desire to do so.</p><p> </p><p>His mother did not cease her efforts with the Lance sisters, however, and soon enough the Lady Helena came to visit with her father, the Earl of the North District. Helena Bertinelli was once a woman whom Oliver had fancied, though she had been unavailable at the time. But since her fiancé’s death in the war, she has become unhinged and, honestly, a bit frightening and he has even less of a desire to see her as Duchess of Starling than he has to become Duke himself. The thought makes him shudder.</p><p> </p><p>During his time home, the parade of wealthy families marching in and out of Queen Castle had seemed never ending and tedious. It seemed that Moira has thrust every available and appropriate young lady at Oliver in the months since his return and several of them, like Lady Laurel, she had forced him to entertain on multiple occasions. He had enough of it before the first visit even began and only played along since in order to give his mother something to do that he at least was aware of, no matter how inconvenient it was for him. Allowing her that small sense of control over his life became especially essential, though increasingly frustrating, once their relationship began to strain even further, to the point where he could barely stand to be in the same room as her. Her disregard for his feelings, for the trials of his own life beyond the castle, the way that she treated his other loved ones – he could not abide by it.</p><p> </p><p>Still, he entertained her matchmaking attempts for the sake of appearances, and to keep her attention focused elsewhere. But his tolerance could only stretch so thinly and the final straw for Oliver had been the visit of the Earl of Lamb Valley and his daughter, the Lady Carrie. Carrie is known throughout the nobility and gentry of Starling to be completely insane and yet her father continues to try to force her hand onto the bachelors of the duchy. With Oliver being the most recent victim of her obsessive intentions. When his mother encouraged him to take her for a walk around their gardens, and she professed her love for him in spite of them only having officially met once before, six years prior, he was done.</p><p>*************************</p><p>He is just not ready to take the titles yet. There is something inside him that is constantly moving, telling him to keep going, to keep <em>looking</em>. And after everything that happened both before and after his time at war, he knows that there will be no stopping for him. Not when there is still so much to do. He does not have the time to assert his control over Starling and start the arduous process of finding, marrying and settling down with a wife. None of the gentry of Starling have taken his fancy in any case, and he has met with all of them. It would take a great deal of effort to find a bride outside of the Starling duchy, and a great deal more to continuously fend off his mother’s attempts to match him to the Lady Laurel.</p><p> </p><p>Besides, in the time since his return, his life has grown far busier than he could ever have imagined, and he has little to no time or patience for women. There are other things he would much rather occupy his time with. Other things that he <em>needs </em>to occupy his time with, things that make his mother’s concerns about his marital status and the number of titles he has seem far more insignificant than ever before.</p><p> </p><p>His relationship with his mother is strained enough as it is. A combination of her actions when he was younger, her decisions after his father’s death, her treatment of his sister since his departure and her forcing women on him so soon after his return from a terrible war – so insistently even after more pressing matters had arisen in his life, and whilst there is a disease ravaging their country to boot – has led to him finding difficulty in tolerating her.</p><p> </p><p>So, with a sorrowful goodbye to his younger sister, Lady Thea, and the hasty stuffing of his pockets with flowers gifted to him by a concerned Raisa attempting to ward off the plague on his travels, he had set off for Slabside Monastery. Once again settling himself into the rhythms of marching onwards with just his closest men by his side and his newest mission consuming his mind. There are some things that cannot even wait for a disease.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Oliver dismounts his trusty mare, Starling, with a thankful pat to her flank. The two of them have been through every second of the war side by side. He named her for his father, to remind him what he was fighting for.</p><p> </p><p>Once Starling is sufficiently thanked, Oliver turns to the Archbishop. Before he can say anything, the ridiculous herald his mother insisted on sending with his entourage steps forwards, the green and black banner of the House of Starling in hand, proudly displaying the crossed bow and arrow that Oliver himself is most proficient in. “Introducing Lord Oliver, the Most Honourable Earl of the Glades!” the man yells, thankfully not continuing to include that various baronies and holdings that Oliver is also entitled to. Honestly, it is a big part of why he has not yet taken his father’s title. When he eventually must, it will increase his titles tenfold and people will have to refer to him as <em>Your Grace</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Before the war, he had not wanted the responsibility. Now, he does not want the power, the pomp and flattery and all the falsities and politics that come with holding such a position. He would much rather be sat around a campfire, sleeping on the floor with his most trusted men and his bow and arrow by his side. He would much rather take his family to a secluded cottage somewhere, a place that they could live in peace and happiness and that he could return to after each day and each mission or chore or whatever his future holds for him. It would be far simpler and far more satisfying. Better.</p><p> </p><p>A fantasy.</p><p> </p><p>“My Lord.” The Archbishop politely inclines his head, shoulders twitching forwards in a tiny bow to acknowledge Oliver’s odd status as an Earl but an Earl who should, by rights, be a Duke. Oliver is used to the confused treatment; he has been experiencing it every time he has met a new person in the last five years.</p><p> </p><p>“Your Excellency.” Oliver replies, returning the incline more deeply. The Archbishop seems pleased by Oliver’s deference. Oliver assesses the Archbishop. He seems ordinary enough, just a middle-aged man with perhaps an unusually blonde head of hair, but otherwise normal. But there is just something about him, Oliver cannot put his finger on it but there is something… <em>calculating</em> about the other man. Something that makes Oliver have to actively prevent his spine from quivering with unease.</p><p> </p><p>“It is an honour to have you joining us, my Lord.” The man says, “I must confess, it came as a shock to many of us that you would wish to serve as a guard here. We had thought that, after so long away at war you would immediately claim your father’s titles.”</p><p> </p><p>This is something else that Oliver has grown used to hearing over the last half decade, “I merely felt that I would be remiss in my duties not to answer the call of God, especially when it came from within my own family’s duchy.”</p><p>“Some would say it is your duchy now, my lord.”</p><p>“Not just yet, Excellency.”</p><p>“Well, I suppose it has worked out in our favour for now. Your prowess on the battlefield has not gone unnoticed, it is a true privilege to have someone as accomplished as yourself here.”</p><p>“Thank you, Archbishop.” Oliver loathes flattery.</p><p>The Archbishop does not notice, “We have, of course, set up the nicest chambers for you. I am sure that you would like to rest after your ling journey, so we shall wait to discuss your role until tomorrow, if that suits you my Lord?”</p><p>“That will be acceptable.”</p><p>*************************</p><p>The rooms Oliver has been provided with are, indeed, luxurious. And ridiculous, considering that he is the only one who will be using them. A family of ten could comfortably fit in here and it sickens Oliver to know that most of the time they are left unused when there are so many people out there who go without a solid roof – without <em>any</em> roof – over their heads, never mind a roof so high and ornate.</p><p> </p><p>He does not even bother to look at the oversized bed that dominates a large portion of the bed chamber. He knows that it will be overly lavish and far too soft for him to sleep on as he had the same issue in his bed at home. Instead, he looks for a clean space on the ground and lays down some blankets and a pillow to rest on.</p><p> </p><p>Sleep does not come easy. It never does. He has too much on his mind, too many memories running through it. There are too many reminders of the things he has seen, the things he has experienced marking his very skin for him to escape any of it. And lying there, under the latticed ceiling of the Slabside Monastery, all that Oliver can think of is his mission, his reason for being there. He knows that, in whatever way it may be, the events of the next day will change his life.</p><p>*************************</p><p>In the morning, a silent monk, one of the regular inhabitants of the Monastery, comes for him. Oliver dresses himself, refusing the help of the servants his mother forced him to bring along, and follows the shorter, unspeaking man to the offices of the Archbishop.</p><p> </p><p>There are two other bishops in the room with Archbishop Darhk. These are the men in charge of whatever event has the clergy both so excited and so secretive.</p><p>“My Lord.” The three men greet him, and Oliver returns their greetings in the appropriate manner.</p><p>“What we are doing here is of the utmost secrecy.” The Archbishop states gravely, “It is known only to the upper echelons of the Starling clergy, the silent monks here at the Monastery and no others. We have been… waiting to take this to the Pope and the King until we know more for certain.” Oliver tries his hardest to keep his expression under control, to only allow through enough interest to make it clear that he is paying attention and ready to receive orders and nothing more. He cannot let them know how eager – how desperate – he is to know what they are about to divulge to him.</p><p> </p><p>He knows that the Archbishop is not keeping whatever this is from the Pope and the King because he is <em>uncertain</em> of anything. Anything important enough to have amassed this sort of attention from the Starling Church is important enough to reach the ears of both men, regardless of the war, regardless of the plague, regardless of any uncertainties. No, this is being kept secret because something <em>wrong</em> is happening. Something possibly illegal, probably even immoral and that the Pope and the King would most likely object to.</p><p> </p><p>If it does ever become known to them, it will only be once Darhk has twisted the situation into something that advantages him and that he can pass as the will of God to his superiors. It is men like Darhk that have led to so many of the people losing faith in the Church. Not in God, but the events of the last year have made it clear that the Church can do nothing to stop this disease. Men like Darhk, who falsely insist that their actions are the will of God in order to gain power are the problem. Oliver has met so many men just like him.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver can feel his blood boiling, fury filling him as he listens to the man before him lie without a second thought. He knows what they have done. Or part of it, at least. He does not know how or why, he is sure that he knows nothing of the full extent of whatever has been happening, but he knows enough. Whatever is happening here is no good, Godly thing. It is perverse and evil, and he is determined to uncover all of Darhk’s precious secrets so that he can expose them to the world and take his revenge. So that he can complete his mission and have even the smallest chance of that fireside future with his friends, even if he knows that his dream of a quiet family life will never be a reality for him.</p><p> </p><p>As much as he is itching to put Darhk in his place, to attack right there and then, Oliver has a mission, so he bites his tongue and nods, plastering the practised smirk trained into him from birth onto his face as he says, “Of course.” In the most power hungry, arrogant manner he can muster.</p><p> </p><p>“We have… come across an anomaly.” The Archbishop starts, “Something truly evil. A creation of the Devil’s designed to spread his evil across the world. He has tried to recreate God’s mightiest creations, but his devil-spawn is imperfect… tainted. The mark of a demon is upon this temptress that was designed to lead astray even God’s angels, but we have found it and captured it!” Oliver would almost believe that the man believes his own raving words, the impassioned way that he spits them is so convincing, but he can see the greedy gleam behind Archbishop Darhk’s eyes, and he knows better.</p><p> </p><p>“We are attempting to contain this seductress before it can do any more damage to the world, but the damage has already been done, I’m afraid, and the Black Death has made its way to Iron Heights. We were awaiting your arrival but must now shut the doors to Slabside to prevent the monster’s miasma from spreading any further. It is for the protection of the people. And to protect the monks and the clergy, we have asked you here. To keep it in its cell whilst we attempt to neutralise its powers.”</p><p> </p><p>They are claiming to have caught a creature that is responsible for spreading the Black Death, Oliver realises. They are claiming that they can contain it within the walls of this Monastery and that they can stop it from spreading any more. Oliver does not know what to think. If they have truly caught such evil, then many lives could be saved, but at what cost? What is it that they are doing that is so awful it could lead to their efforts being stopped?</p><p> </p><p>Oliver has an inkling. He has the most horrible feeling, and he prays that it is not true, but he knows how often his instincts are correct. Especially about the behaviours of greedy, selfish men.</p><p>*************************</p><p>He feels as if he is in a trance as they guide him down to the catacombs beneath the Monastery. They are a bustle of activity as the oldest and most precious texts are housed down there, away from the light that streams through the towering decorative windows that adorn every inch of the main structures. Monks stream in and out of rooms, constantly moving but as silent as ever. The monks at Slabside have all taken a vow of silence. Oliver knows that this must be why Archbishop Darhk has chosen Slabside for whatever he is doing. The only people here are those who physically cannot tell anybody else thanks to their vows. And Oliver too, now.</p><p> </p><p>As they guide him down, they explain to him what his role will be. He is to head the men who will guard the monastery – specifically the cells deep within the catacombs, to watch over this evil that they have entrapped so as to protect all of the monks and clergy and military who are about to be quarantined at Slabside. It seems a simple enough task, and one that Oliver knows will put him in prime position to discover what is truly happening deep down in the Slabside catacombs.</p><p> </p><p>They reach a heavily bolted door, two large monks stood in front of it. These are the temporary guards, on loan from the Monastery until Oliver and his men can take over. Oliver nods his respect to the holy men, and they move aside to allow Oliver and the Archbishop in. The two other bishops stay outside.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Beyond the door is a line of cells, all empty except one. They are small, they would barely be able to contain Oliver if he were to be thrown inside one, but the quivering figure inside is tiny. Skeletal, almost. Underfed and cold and hurt.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver feels his heart lurch.</p><p> </p><p>Anger makes his spine stiffen and his muscles bunch as every single one of them tenses. His hands clench and unclench at his sides. The hairs on the back of his neck raise in horror at the barbaric <em>sacrilege</em> before him.</p><p> </p><p>She is… she is an <em>angel</em>. There is no other way to describe her. Every inch of her is angelic. The harsh words of the Archbishop flash through his mind: <em>devil-spawn, demon, temptress, seductress, monster</em>, but Oliver <em>knows</em> – somehow, he just <em>knows</em>, the same thing in his gut that tells him of the Archbishop’s impure intentions speaking to him once again – that none of this is true. He knows that the woman, the perfect, <em>exquisite</em> creature before him, cannot be anything but pure. Whether she is truly an angel or something else, he does not know, but regardless of the circumstances of her creation, he knows her to be intrinsically, fundamentally <em>good</em>.</p><p> </p><p>She is God-sent, not Devil-born. She is no temptress, her constant shaking is not designed to seduce, she is abused, she is innocent.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver inhales sharply, the very sight of her stealing the breath from his lungs and it catches her attention. Quick as a whip, her head snaps around to face him, revealing a gaunt face. Her porcelain skin is ashen, sunken against her bones in a dreadful way that only serves to highlight her skull. Her wrists are so tiny, bones at every joint sticking out unhealthily and the massive limbs behind her look ratty and unkempt.</p><p> </p><p>But still, in spite of all of that, Oliver can see that she is beautiful. Her high cheekbones, though exaggerated by her thinness, speak of an elegant bone structure, her bowed lips are plush and enticing, despite their pale blue shade. And her eyes… <em>God, her eyes</em>. They are crystalline, the bluest of blues, shining with an unspoken intelligence as she takes him in. They capture him, drawing him into her and before he knows it, he is taking a step forward.</p><p> </p><p>A whimper escapes her, and she lurches back in her cell, scrabbling to get as far away from him as possible in the small space. Her golden hair swings, betraying the desperate tremors that the terrified girl’s body is experiencing in response to his movement and Oliver is immediately remorseful. What has she been through to have such a reaction?</p><p> </p><p>And Darhk… Darhk <em>laughs</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver’s vision goes red, murder the only thought on his mind, saving this woman the only thing that he can think of.</p><p> </p><p>“As you can see, the Devil did his best with her.” The Archbishop is smirking, making Oliver itch to wring his neck even more but his words also have the effect of making him think. He restrains himself, reminding himself of why he is at Slabside in the first place, and why he cannot blow everything by striking so soon. “But he is not God, and so she is flawed.” The Archbishop continues.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver disagrees. She is not flawed, she is <em>perfect</em>. From the tips of her toes to the tips of her trembling reddened primaries, she is perfect. Oliver remembers that angels should have white wings, he remembers seeing it in every depiction of an angel he has ever come across. But that is all that they are, depictions. Oliver doubts that there is a man alive beyond this monastery who has seen a true, living angel. There is nothing to say that all angels must have white wings. But he also knows that the archbishop is using the fact that the woman in the cell does not fit the archetype of angelic colouring to suggest that she is different, lesser. Oliver knows that this is what Darhk is using to make his claim that to she was born of Lucifer rather than of God.</p><p> </p><p>The wings arch up from her back – Oliver cannot see where they connect or how because her front is facing him – but even from her cramped position, curled in on herself, he can see that they must be as big as if not bigger than she is. Her wingspan must be two times his height at least, not that they can stretch out in the minuscule jail she is in, but they still manage to look as dainty and elegant as the rest of her small frame does. They are as white as snow, the physical representation of everything that an angel stands for but her primaries – the feathers lining the ends of the wings – are as red as garnets. Like they have been dipped in blood. The bases of the primaries are an off-white shade that darkens to the red that makes up the most of them and then, at the very tips, to black like charcoal.</p><p> </p><p>“The red is an obvious sign that she has been touched by the Devil.” The Archbishop blabbers, unaware of how hard Oliver is having to try to keep from killing the other man. To stop himself from bludgeoning a powerful member of the Church to death. “And the smell coming from her is a sign of the plague that she is expelling into the world. It is a good thing that you carry posies in your pockets. That will have to be a mandatory thing for any of the men who spend time outside or within this block.” Oliver remembers the flowers that he had put back into his pockets to honour Raisa’s final request of him before he left. He highly doubts that there is any such miasma to protect himself from in this room. It barely even smells, an impressive feat since they have been keeping a living creature locked up in here for God knows how long without access to any kind of necessities.</p><p> </p><p>“We managed to subdue it and contain it, and as you can see, we have been keeping it weak so as to not give it a chance to escape again. It has already spread its sickness to Iron Heights, and it has been making its way to Slabside. We do not need it getting any further, I’m sure many are already infected.” Oliver thinks that if the Archbishop calls her ‘it’ one last time, he might pull out a sword.</p><p> </p><p>The Archbishop continues to drone on, checking with Oliver that he and his men have the capability to keep a tortured, half-starved, tiny young woman in her cell, but Oliver just looks at the figure before him. She still has not taken her azure eyes from his.</p><p> </p><p>Saving this girl – this <em>angel</em> just became a non-negotiable part of his mission. Nobody should be left in squalor like this, let alone someone as perfect as her. It will complicate everything, and it will all be about ten times harder, but Oliver knows that he will never forgive himself if he does not at least try.</p><p> </p><p>Something instinctual within him just knows that he has to save her.</p><p> </p><p>Lucky for him, he is locked in quarantine inside Slabside for the foreseeable future. Only his men, the silence of the monks, the scheming of the Archbishop and the angel they are holding captive to keep him company. He has plenty of time to figure out all the logistics.</p><p> </p><p>Filled with a new sense of purpose, he follows the Archbishop from the cell block, nodding along to the Darhk’s suggestions as he goes, all in the name of maintaining his cover.</p><p> </p><p>Behind him is the girl he is going to save and, just beyond the bars of her cell, so that she can reach out and grab it, a small, slightly crumpled posy. Bright yellow daffodils from the Queen gardens, woven into the posy provide a colour to the room matched only by her hair, a symbol of new beginnings and rebirth.</p><p> </p><p>The door slams shut and a hand darts out, snatching the delicate bundle from the ground.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Well... at least it wasn't a big cliffhanger this time. Next chapter title is lavender.</p><p>Also, France is a beautiful country that I've enjoyed visiting and studying. At this time in history, however, the Hundred Year War had begun so the French and the English were not exactly on the best of terms, which is part of why Oliver is so angry with them, and is also why they killed his dad.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. lavender</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>lavender : a symbol of devotion and purity; a promise of silence</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Today is the one year anniversary of me posting the first chapter of posies. When I started it back in the first lockdown, I never imagined that it would take me this long to get back to it, but I am also amazed that I am here and posting chapter II today. This is going to be a kind of long note, I promise they'll be shorter from now on but there is some very important information I am going to convey here so it's important that you read at least the start.</p><p>First of all, this fic is going to deal with some fairly dark themes. It is set in the mid-fourteenth century during the bubonic plague pandemic which could be triggering for some people. This time was also a time of war between England and France and the fic will touch on that too. It is also going to deal with torture, which is described fairly graphically and one case of which is particularly gruesome (I will make very clear warnings when this happens), violence in many forms, mentions of miscarriage (none of the characters will miscarry) and a mention of non-consensual sex - though nobody in this fic has been or will be sexually assaulted. It is also centered around Felicity's captivity and the abuse she has received during it, and the brutal treatment she has received at Darhk's hands. I have tagged everything as best as I can, though the tags are liable to change and if anybody feels I have not tagged something that I need to, I would appreciate it if you could let me know. To attempt to prevent spoilers, there are some things that I have not tagged yet but that I will tag when we get to it. I will also be writing spoiler-free and major trigger warnings at the end of the beginning notes and spoiler-containing summaries in the end notes for each chapter so if you are worried about being triggered by anything, please check before you read. Again, I will do my best to clearly signpost anything that anybody might want to avoid.</p><p>For anyone getting this update today who hasn't seen my twitter, I have updated chapter I, which has been altered and extended to make it fit better with how the fic progresses. It's not much but I would recommend re-reading - not least because it's been a year!</p><p>Other than that, I really hope that you all enjoy this! It has been a labour of love and I have spent a lot of time writing it and become very attached to these characters. I adore this version of Oliver and Felicity and I hope you do too! I started it last year as part of the Q&amp;C fic drive and then last July I decided to make it my NaNo project. I thought I'd get it done back then but after writing 100k during Nano and not even getting halfway through, it became apparent that I would not. After months of love, writer's block and distractions by other fics, I've decided to start posting it today. It's currently around 180k and I have more than enough chapters complete to see me through to the end of the semester at uni, so updates will be regular and if I am going to miss one for any reason, I will try to warn you beforehand.</p><p>Updates will be every Saturday from now on.</p><p>I promise this is nearly over but first I need to thank the people who've made it possible for me to be here posting this today! Firstly I need to thank all the girls in the group chat, I honestly would not have made it through the last year without each and every one of you, you're the best group of friends and I love you all. Mandy and Joy, thank you for reading snippets and always suporting me through this process. Lexi, thank you for being the queen of wingfics, this wouldn't exist without you and your encouragement has been invaluable. Cerys, thank you for convincing me I could keep writing even when I thought I'd gone too far and couldn't continue. Shel, thank you for talking me through my first NaNo and always being such an amazing friend and sounding board. And last, but most definitely not least, Lettie. This literally never would have happened without you. It was your constant enthusiasm and love for the daily snippets I sent your way that made me write 100K in a month last year and it has been your continued excitement and support that has got me to this moment. Thank you &lt;3</p><p> </p><p>  <b>TRIGGER WARNINGS: a character in captivity, mentions of malnutrition and starvation.</b></p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>II Lavender</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>Oliver leaves the Archbishop’s side at the first available opportunity, barely able to keep himself together for long enough to do so. Rage spreads like a tangible thing within him, travelling through his veins, hot and fiery, and by the time that he has made his way back to his chambers, he is ready to explode. The door slams shut behind him, heavy oak crashing into the thick stone and the second that it does, Oliver lets out a violent yell. His fist flies into the frame of his provided bed, wood creaking under the force of it, possibly splintering. All that he can see is her tiny body flinching away from him, scared of something as small as the mere <em>possibility</em> of him touching her.</p><p> </p><p>What has she been through? He tears something from the wall. What <em>is</em> she going through? His foot crashes through something solid. What could be happening to-</p><p> </p><p><em>No</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver forces his eyes to open and focus on the room around him rather than the terrible thoughts racing through his head. Worrying will do him no good, it will do <em>her</em> no good. <em>Nobody</em> benefits from him throwing his weight around in the privacy of his own room, they only benefit from him keeping himself calm. In control. The best thing that he can do is keep his wits about him, find everything that he needs to find, and then get himself, her and everybody else as far away from Archbishop Darhk as possible.</p><p> </p><p>He settles himself on the floor amidst the mess he himself made and simply breathes for a few moments, exorcising the fury from his blood as he clears his mind. Once he is calm enough, he surveys the destruction around him and stands, head clearer and focused on what needs to be done.</p><p>*************************</p><p>A knock sounds at the door when he is halfway through tidying the carnage he has created in during his fit of anger, and Oliver quickly moves to the door to greet his friends. John Diggle has been his friend since early in the war. Oliver had been assigned Digg’s company as soon as he enlisted, despite his naïveté. Though Oliver had been trained in combat and politics and leadership since his childhood, he had never exactly paid enough attention to truly develop his skills outside of the heat of battle and was wildly unsuited for command. Fortunately for him, Digg had stepped up and shown him the ropes until he was capable of leading himself. That had never stopped him from turning to his friend, and second in command, for guidance though.</p><p> </p><p>Digg would be the last choice for most of Oliver’s peers in the nobility to rely on, as an African man, but as far as Oliver is concerned, he is the most trained, disciplined and knowledgeable man under his command. And he was willing to help Oliver, a complete stranger. An entitled, clueless boy thrown irresponsibly into the thick of things. Once Oliver had accepted the help, and he and Digg grew close, he never looked back. Digg is the best kind of man, and a loyal friend. There is nobody else who Oliver would rather be at his side in battle. Not even his childhood best friend Tommy, the son of Lord Malcolm Merlyn, Earl of The Triangle and South End and the second most powerful man in Starling, after Oliver himself.</p><p> </p><p>Roy had been another matter. The boy had come to Oliver just over a year into his time in the war, young and desperate to both prove his worth and to be able to feed himself. Oliver had taken a chance on the angry young man, trying to help him direct his anger into more productive actions and after a lot of work, they had succeeded. Roy had proven himself over and over again through their many battles and Oliver trusts him almost as fully as he trusts Digg.</p><p> </p><p>The third member of his inner circle is Ray Palmer, the knighted son of the Earl of Pennytown. Oliver had known Ray when they were younger but had never really been able to get along with the upright man. Since the start of the war, however, Palmer volunteered to stand by Oliver’s side as his official, though not his actual, second in command. Ever since, in their time together at war, he has shown himself to be brave and loyal, if a bit by-the-book. The man is the brains of their group, his strengths lying more in books and intelligence than in combat and though he and Oliver will probably never be the best of friends, they know they can trust one another.</p><p> </p><p>Lyla Michaels had been the biggest shock of Oliver’s military career. As the daughter of some viscount from Orchid Bay, she is technically a baroness in her own right, but she is like no member of the gentry Oliver has ever met before. At the start of the war, she stole away from home and cut her hair short, binding her breasts to fit them under the heavy armour of the King’s warriors as she passed for a short man. It had been quite the surprise when he had discovered his best and deadliest soldier bathing alone in a lake and being very much female.</p><p> </p><p>In her years of service prior to Oliver’s enlistment, she had met and fallen in love with Digg. The two had never been able to marry, thanks to Lyla being forced to fake her gender in order to be allowed to serve and because the colour of Digg’s skin would stop them even if she did not have to hide her true self. But they have never let that keep them from one another. Just as Lyla found a way to get past the way society viewed her thanks to the nature of her sex, by proving that a woman could be just as handy as a man in a fight – if not more so – she had also proven that she and Digg could be together, wearing down his noble objections one by one.</p><p> </p><p>Under Oliver, they are able to secretly be together, the nature of their relationship and of Lyla’s femininity known only to the select, trusted few. Oliver is constantly pleased to see that, in spite of the constant threat of what would happen if they were ever found out, they still manage to be happy in their lives together. They even have adorable twin toddlers who had been welcomed into the world during some carefully planned shore leave for the couple.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver admires his friends and how much they have overcome just to be happy together, and he knows that their happiness is hard earned. Their lives are difficult, and he cannot imagine what it is like for them to have to leave Sara and John Junior – JJ for short – with Lyla’s, thankfully open-minded parents, for extended periods of time as they fight. He struggles enough to leave Thea. But every time he sees his friends together, he knows that it is more than worth it for them.</p><p> </p><p>Rory Regan had been another wildcard, much like Roy. He has only been with Oliver for a year but has quickly proven his trustworthiness, both in the battlefield and in keeping Lyla and Digg’s secrets after he accidentally walked in on the two of them together. His guerrilla tactics have added a valued layer to Oliver’s battle strategies and have led to a reduction in loss of life that Oliver is grateful for. He knows that the younger man will do what needs to be done when the time comes.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Digg walks in first and, upon seeing the state of the room, he turns to Oliver with an eyebrow raised half in bemusement and half in concern. In the special way that two brothers-in-arms can develop during their long years of war, Oliver signals to his friend that he will explain everything. Lyla looks equally concerned, as she knows that Oliver is not usually one to lose his head like he had earlier, but like the excellent soldier she is, she just marches in and takes a seat without saying anything. Roy is almost amused but knows better than to say anything as he has suffered the consequences of ticking Oliver off in training more than once before.</p><p> </p><p>If Oliver were not in such a serious state of mind, Ray’s expression would have him huffing out a laugh just like Roy. The man looks positively offended by the mess. Unlike Rory, the last to enter, who barely even reacts. Rory is always eerily nonplussed by everything. When Oliver first met him, he found him a little creepy, but he now knows that the younger man just keeps everything very hidden and likes to take the time to assess a situation before he reacts to it. Over time, Rory’s muted, miniscule reactions have become easier for Oliver to read as he knows what to look for.</p><p> </p><p>Once Oliver joins them at the table which, thankfully, remains undamaged, Lyla wastes no time, “What happened here, Oliver?”</p><p>Oliver’s teeth grind together in an attempt to contain himself as another flash of the skeletal angel passes through his mind, “I…” his jaw clenches, “I found something. In the catacombs.”</p><p>“You found-” John starts to ask.</p><p>“No.” Oliver grits out.</p><p>“You didn’t find anything to do with-” John tries again.</p><p>“I don’t know.” Oliver hisses, his anger spilling out at his friend, before sighing, “I’m sorry. I just… I don’t know. It’s possibly related but I don’t know.”</p><p> </p><p>“What did you find then?” Lyla asks, moving the conversation along as she senses Oliver needs them to.</p><p>Closing his eyes for a moment, mind filled with the tremors that had wracked her body, he gathers himself. “I don’t know.” He whispers, haunted by the sight of her skeletal limbs and wasting wings huddled in that filthy space, “A girl.”</p><p>“A girl?” Roy exclaims. Frowns mar all of their faces, both confused as to why a woman other than Lyla would be in the all-male monastery and also not understanding why her presence would be significant enough to elicit such a violent response from Oliver.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes. And no.” Oliver tries to ground himself back in the moment, to bring himself back into the room rather than dwelling in the catacomb cell she has been forced into, “She is female. Young, maybe in her early to mid-twenties as far as her appearance goes. But she is not entirely… human.”</p><p>“Oliver, what do you mean?” Ray presses, intrigued enough to forgo decorum and call Oliver by his first name as Oliver has been requesting for years.</p><p>“<em>I think she is an angel</em>.” Oliver breathes.</p><p> </p><p>The entire table goes still, everybody looking at Oliver in disbelief as they take in his statement.</p><p>Roy laughs, breaking the silence, “Were you <em>that </em>captivated by her good looks?”</p><p>“I’m not telling you I saw an angel because I saw an attractive woman, Roy.” Oliver snaps, “I mean, of course she was… she was <em>beautiful</em>.” His eyes lose focus as he thinks of those bright, clever eyes set in that gorgeous skull, beautiful even behind the agony and stress of her captivity, “But I was far more focused on the <em>wings sprouting from her back</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>That makes everybody refocus, realising that Oliver is not jesting in the slightest, “<em>Wings</em>?” Digg asks.</p><p>“They are… they’re <em>magnificent</em>.” Oliver informs them, still at a loss for the words that could have any hope of describing the ethereal creature he had seen, “At least as tall as me each, maybe even larger, and she was <em>tiny</em> by comparison. They could have wrapped around her entire body multiple times with ease. And white, white as freshly fallen snow and <em>gleaming</em> even in that dark, horrible place. But the ends – her primaries – they were not white, but crimson. Like they had been dipped in blood. Not in a violent way, it was pure and natural, just beauty right from the pale roots to the blackened tips.</p><p> </p><p>“There was just something about her.” He feels as if he is in a trance as he continues, “Like she was pure light made solid. I don’t know how but I could feel a… a <em>goodness</em> from her. No evil, not even a trace.” He is forceful as he finishes speaking, his anger seeping back in as he moves on from the memory of <em>her</em> and onto the thought of her conditions. Onto the thought of how Darhk had spoken of her, how he had treated her.</p><p> </p><p>Insightful as always, Rory picks up in the change in Oliver’s tone, “Oliver… where was she, this angel?”</p><p>Appreciative of Rory not questioning what Oliver has said, he steels himself, “She was in a cell, in the catacombs.” Gasps fill the room in response. Oliver and his inner circle have been through enough together that, at this point, they are able to believe one another, no matter how outlandish their claims. So, when Oliver says he has seen a winged girl in a cell in the catacombs under Slabside Monastery, they believe him. And they know that what is happening in this place is evil.</p><p> </p><p>“Why?” Lyla asks, her hand gripping John’s in a show of the lovers’ support for one another.</p><p>“Darhk… he is claiming that she is the cause of the pestilence. He is claiming that he can contain the spread by imprisoning her here and quarantining the monastery.”</p><p>“How?” asks Ray.</p><p>“Because her wings are not pure white – because of the red and black – he is saying that the Devil created her to seduce God’s true angels and to spread evil across the world, but that because he is not God, she is imperfect. But you must know, <em>you have to believe me</em>; she is <em>perfect</em>. I cannot tell you for certain that she is truly one of God’s angels, but she is definitely not evil. She is <em>good</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“But what does he want with her, how does he expect to stop the plague by keeping her here?” Ray presses, always curious.</p><p>“I don’t know.” Oliver admits, “I don’t know. But I do know this: whatever Darhk is doing with her, it is nothing good. He has her kept like an animal. Her wings are crumpled into a cell far too small for them, she is filthy and <em>starved</em>. So thin that I could see her ribs pressing through her clothes and she is only wearing a thin shift, she must be freezing down there. And she flinched back when I stepped towards her, like she expected me to hurt her or… or, I don’t know, something even worse. She was <em>terrified</em> and I felt so powerless to help her as Darhk stood there calling her an ‘it’ and treating her like she was <em>nothing</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>Five horrified expressions face him, “They’re keeping an angel in a cell?” Roy asks, gobsmacked.</p><p>“They’re hurting her.” Oliver whimpers, chest aching. He feels a compulsion to stand and rush back down to those catacombs, to wrap her in his clothes and carry her back up to his room so that he can nurse her back to health. His arms ache at the thought. She must weigh next to nothing, even with the wings. She is so small, there is so little to her.</p><p> </p><p>It is John who brings Oliver back to business, “And,” he starts, “You think that there’s a possibility that it’s connected?”</p><p>“Yes.” Oliver’s mind wanders, “Yes, I think that they might be. But we need to know <em>how</em>. And <em>why</em>. We need to know more before we can do anything. As terrible as it is to wait, as hard as it will be, acting too quickly will only make things worse.”</p><p>“You’re right.” Lyla agrees, “From what you have said, seeing her like that regularly will be extremely difficult but we have to let it happen for now. And then, when we know enough and we are ready to make our move, we can do something.”</p><p> </p><p>Everybody else nods their agreement. “And I’m assuming that we will be adding saving her to our list?” It is not really a question, more a statement of fact and Lyla knows it as she says it, eyes expectant on Oliver.</p><p>“Yes.” Oliver determines, unwilling to bend in any way on it. That angel down there needs somebody’s help. She needs saving, and he and his allies, his most trusted friends, will be the ones to do it.</p><p>“That’s going to complicate things.” Digg says, “But there is no way that we can leave her like that, angel or not.” Nobody argues. When Oliver and John agree on something so vehemently, it is a command and not up for discussion. Especially when Lyla is on their side too. Lyla terrifies everybody into compliance.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Freshly invigorated with the new addition to their mission, the six of them discuss their plans further. They are to guard both the girl’s cell and the wider monastery and quickly agree that the only ones who can be trusted to watch over her are the six of them and not any of their fellow comrades. They plan to rotate in eight hour shifts in pairs, with each of them having eight hours of commanding the rest of the soldiers and eight hours for sleep, council and eating in between.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver pairs himself with Roy, who he knows he can trust most after Lyla and Digg as he will need somebody to be able to take the actions that he would, should he become incapacitated. They take the night shift so that Oliver will be available to the rest of his men in the day, and also able to investigate the catacombs when on duty as the monks will be abed in the night. Lyla and Digg take the shift before, Oliver wanting them to work together so that they can also rest together as he does not know how long they will be stationed at the monastery. Ray and Rory are his weakest pairing, which is why he gives them the morning shift, when things are least likely to happen. He hopes.</p><p> </p><p>All that he knows is that they have much to do, and nowhere near enough time to get it done. Things are far direr than ever after his discovery of the girl, and time is his enemy more than ever before. But he trusts his team, and he knows that they will get their jobs done. They are a strange group, but it works for them.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Oliver stays up all night, unable to sleep as he thinks about the woman suffering so far below him. Instead, he plans his next moves and spends hours trying to get in the mind-set of the Archbishop, desperate to fathom out the reasons behind his actions. He cannot. If Oliver were a powerful man of the Church, and he had found a living, breathing, flesh and blood angel, he would be desperate to shower her with praise and gifts and to share her glory with the entire world. He would want to show to his people that God had not forsaken them, to prove that God still loved them with the evidence of that love in the form of one of his most glorious creations. Locking her away and abusing her seems completely illogical to Oliver, especially in a world slowly losing its faith in the Church.</p><p> </p><p>Eventually, long after sunrise, he passes out from sheer exhaustion, the combined stressors of his family and the long journey and the world-shaking day pulling him from consciousness. He is lucky that his shift with the soldiers does not start until two o’clock in the afternoon.</p><p> </p><p>The clergy have apparently deigned to allow him a day to get his soldiers settled in and routines set up as they do not bother him once during the eight hours that he trains and commands the men. Those eight hours of work are painful for him, his head and heart trapped in the cells with that young woman, impatient for his body to catch up and investigate. He is so distracted that Roy almost manages to get a hit in, something that has only previously happened when Oliver has been sick or injured.</p><p> </p><p>Finally, though, Oliver and Roy are able to make their way down the winding catacombs to meet Digg and Lyla.</p><p> </p><p>“Anything?” Oliver asks his friends, not bothering with a greeting.</p><p>“No.” John answers, hushed, “Regan and Palmer said that, when they were escorted down here, they were warned not to go through this door and into the cell block if they want to stay clear of the pestilence, and that they were to pass the message on to any other guards to be stationed here. But nothing else happened on their shift and Michaels and I have been left alone since we were brought down here.”</p><p>“Good.” Oliver says, “And food? For the prisoner.”</p><p>“Regan and Palmer were brought down with a hunk of bread and a bucket of water, but that is all that she has received since they came here.”</p><p> </p><p>Oliver bristles, the evidence of her starvation and mistreatment like a dagger to his heart.</p><p>“Lyla, before you sleep, go to them on their shift and tell them that, if they can, they are to smuggle something else along next time they come.” He orders, “And the same to the two of you. If we can bring her at least a little of something along three times a day, then that should stop her from starving to death if nothing else. Do it before you separate for the mission.” John and Lyla nod their affirmative. “And John, if you can run and find something edible for her right now and bring it down to me then that would be excellent.”</p><p> </p><p>“And what about the instructions not to enter?” Lyla inquires.</p><p>“That girl is no more responsible for the plague than you or I are.” He insists.</p><p>“That was not my concern.”</p><p>Understanding that, Oliver simply says, “Let me handle the Archbishop, just try to time your entries carefully. And be gentle with her. God knows what she has been through since Darhk found her.”</p><p> </p><p>With that, John and Lyla leave Oliver and Roy on guard, both itching to enter the prison but wary of being seen. As much as Oliver would like to just barge in and do what he can to alleviate her suffering, he knows that he must be cautious. And his caution pays off when, mere moments after John and Lyla’s departure, one of Darhk’s men appears without warning and requests that Oliver leave Roy on guard alone in order to conference with the Archbishop.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver agrees, not bothering to point out that just past ten o’clock at night is not exactly a usual hour for an Archbishop and the son of a duke to converse about their prisoner or whatever else it is that Darhk wishes to speak to him of. He just goes, with a look of warning to Roy as he does and hopes that the meeting will go quickly so that he can return and look upon his angel once again.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Archbishop Darhk starts their meeting predictably, with the pleasantries and formalities required of men of their status. Oliver works awfully hard to not let his revulsion at the other man show, but fears that Darhk may have noticed the hurried manner in which Oliver greeted him. Neither of them speaks of it though, they just settle into chairs across from one another and begin their business.</p><p> </p><p>Darhk inquires as to how Oliver’s men are settling in. It is something that always gives Oliver a measure of amusement as he thinks of the woman included in that group and just how scandalised the men he is forced to spend time with would be were they to discover that the soldier they all admire so much was of the ‘fairer’ sex. There is nothing fair about Lyla, she is ruthless.</p><p> </p><p>Nevertheless, Oliver updates Darhk on his plans and the weak points of the monastery where he has stationed his men after walking a few patrols himself after awaking. He gives the other man a list of the rotations and patrols that will be circling and explains who will be guarding the cell that the ‘creature’ is being kept in. Darhk is initially confused as to why Oliver is only planning to station the same six people there day in, day out and is even more perplexed by Oliver’s decision to pass eight hours of each day there himself. Oliver supposes that, to Darhk, the idea of doing one’s own hard work is a foreign concept. He explains that the ‘creature’ is of utmost importance and secrecy, and that he only trusts a select group of ‘men’ to uphold that level of secrecy whilst also adequately guarding the cell.</p><p> </p><p>It is all true. Just perhaps not quite in the way that he presents it to the Archbishop.</p><p> </p><p>Darhk seems incredibly pleased by what Oliver is saying, clearly believing that he has found the right man to help him achieve whatever twisted goal he is working towards. Oliver daydreams about smashing the man’s face into the table at which they are seated.</p><p> </p><p>“Archbishop,” he starts slowly, carefully selecting his words, “Are there any other… assets… that require the guardianship of my men?” he asks. He knows that there are. He knows that there must be. And if the angel is the one that Darhk was willing to show Oliver, then he can only imagine what the man is keeping secret. Nobody like Darhk would show their entire hand to another powerful man like Oliver, certainly not so soon after meeting one another.</p><p> </p><p>Darhk’s eyes are cold and sharp as they stare into Oliver, assessing the young earl. Oliver has to repress the urge to shudder as he feels as if Darhk can see straight into his soul, he feels like his every thought is laid bare for Darhk to read. “No.” Darhk lies, “Nothing that requires your attention, I shall need all of your focus on the demoness.”</p><p>“Yes, Your Excellency.” Oliver curtly acknowledges. He knew that it was a shot in the dark, but he could not contain the hope for an easy solve.</p><p> </p><p>Knowing that he has to drop the matter for the moment so as not to raise any suspicion so early in the game, he tries another line of questioning, “If I may ask, how did you capture… <em>it</em>?” He forces the last word out, even as it feels like hot knives scraping the inside of his throat to refer to her in such a way.</p><p> </p><p>A chilling grin spreads over Darhk’s face, “With a great deal of time and energy, my lord. It cost a lot, but we caught the monster in the end.”</p><p>Oliver swallows, “I see.” He does. He sees that he is going to get nothing more from the Archbishop. For now, at least. “Well, I had better get back to my station.” He announces, standing up. Darhk stands with him and the two give one another the awkward respectful bows that two men of high standing give one another before Darhk shows him out.</p><p> </p><p>Making a concerted effort not to run, Oliver quickly marches his way back down into the catacombs towards Roy and the girl. Thankfully, he encounters nobody on his journey into the deepest part of the monastery and in no time, is turning the corner to see Digg and Roy stood sentry.</p><p> </p><p>“Digg.” Oliver says, planting himself before his two comrades so that nobody can see anything beyond his own back and one of each of their shoulders should they come down for whatever reason. “Did you get something?”</p><p>“I did my best.” The response makes Oliver, who had been hoping to provide something substantial to the girl, deflate. “I managed to scrape some stuff together but on such short notice it is not much.” Digg laments, “Just some more bread and a little meat.”</p><p>“Meat?” Oliver asks.</p><p>“Chicken.”</p><p>Relief floods Oliver, “Well done, John. It might not be much but it is enough for now, we’ll figure something more out tomorrow. Getting her some meat is more than I had hoped for. I’d imagine that it has been a good long while since she last ate anything decent.”</p><p> </p><p>John nods his goodbye to each of them before leaving, scouting out the route to the surface for anybody as he goes. Oliver sends Roy to go and check the other tunnels, wanting to be certain that he will not be caught, especially not so soon after asking questions of Darhk. And then <em>finally</em> Oliver has the chance to lay eyes upon her once more.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Quivering with anticipation, he orders Roy to tell anybody who might ask why he is on guard alone that Oliver has not returned from his meeting with Darhk yet and then he opens the door to the cells. Inside, it is as dark and dank as he remembers, the walls encrusted with dirt and the floor icy cold. Oliver shivers, whether from the unsettled feeling that the room instils in him or from the chill that hangs pervasively in the air, he does not know.</p><p> </p><p>When he reaches the only occupied cell in the entire room, his heart lurches in his chest once again. Just the sight of her has it beating faster, that draw to her that has been so difficult to fight becoming impossible to deny when his eyes are upon her. She is somehow more beautiful than he remembered. She shines like a beacon in the darkened room, and he is a moth drawn to her light. It makes him forget himself again and he moves too quickly. As soon as he has moved to the bars of her cell, she is scrabbling backwards in frantic attempt to escape even though there is nowhere else for her to go. This time, without Darhk droning on in his ears, the only sound the rushing of his own blood in his ears, he can hear her.</p><p> </p><p>She speaks not a word, but what he can hear is infinitely worse than anything that she could articulate. It tells him everything that he needs to know, it shows him exactly how frightened she is. She is <em>whimpering</em>. Small puffs of air are escaping from her as she hyperventilates in her sheer terror of <em>him</em>. A stranger. Oliver feels a pained sound fall from his own lips, the sight of the glorious woman before him in such distress a dagger to his heart.</p><p> </p><p>Without meaning to, he crashes to his knees before her, only realising that he has done so when pangs of pain shoot up his legs at the impact. Involuntary though it may have been, it was clearly the wrong thing to do. The second that his kneecaps make contact with the ground, she lets out an audible cry and redoubles her efforts to get away, so much so that Oliver fears she is going to hurt herself. He can see her chest heaving with sobs, her eyes wild and unfocused and he has never felt so powerless in his entire life.</p><p> </p><p>He has never felt at such a loss for what to do next. He has no idea how to help her – how to calm her enough to be able to make her understand that he means her no harm. That he just wants to help.</p><p> </p><p>“Please.” He begs, eyes imploring her to listen, to believe him. “Please, I’m not going to hurt you.” She does not stop trying to press her body into the wall behind her, “Please.” He tries again, “I just want to help.” Trying not to make any sudden movements, he raises his hands so that they are open with the palms facing her as he holds them next to his head, showing her that he has no weapon in hand.</p><p> </p><p>“Please. My name is Oliver. Oliver Queen of Starling.” He tells her, and some combination of his unthreatening stance and his speaking to her as an equal rather than as a piece of filth must work. Her frantic movements slow enough that, instead of her feet slipping across the floor as she constantly uses them to push herself backwards, they still. He can see the bare muscles in her legs straining and knows that she must still be trying to push herself backwards but still he takes it as a win.</p><p> </p><p>“I am, obviously not <em>the </em>Queen of Starling. My name is Oliver Queen and I am from Starling.” He repeats, “I was born in Castlefall. I am a member of the King’s armed forces and I volunteered to come here and work as a guard because I knew that there was something more going on here that is being kept secret from the outside world. And when the Archbishop,” she flinches at the word and he feels his heart clench, “When he showed you to me, I knew I was right.”</p><p> </p><p>Some of the tension in her muscles has lessened, her feathers have stopped shivering as her shaking has lessened, but she is still forcing her body into an unnatural position. Her wings are bent under her in a way that he knows must be incredibly uncomfortable, and they give off little shudders every so often in an expression of the strain that they must be under. She has curved her entire body inwards, contorted so that she can press as much of herself into the corner as possible. But his heart still leaps with hope as, at his words, she pauses and allows her wing to slip down just enough that he catches a glimpse of her eyes fixed upon him, actually taking in what he is saying.</p><p> </p><p>“I swear to you,” he vows in a whisper, “I <em>never</em> want to hurt you. I just want to help. I don’t know what you have been through or what Darhk is doing with you, but I do know that it is utterly wrong, and I will not just sit back and watch it happen, not whenever I have the power to do something about it. I’m sorry that I didn’t say anything yesterday, but he was there, and I need to maintain the illusion of my compliance until I fully understand what is happening, but I am going to do what I can to ease your suffering until then.</p><p> </p><p>“I can’t do much about Darhk right now. I can’t do anything to get you out of this disgusting cage that he is keeping you in and I do not yet know how to stop him from doing to you whatever he does that makes you flinch back at the thought of being touched, or that has caused for you to lose your feathers there,” her wing twitches at this, the angle shifting so that the bald patch on the underside of her right wing is no longer visible to him, “I’m sorry.” He repeats.</p><p> </p><p>“But,” he says, thinking it best to move on rather than to dwell on that bare patch of skin and the implications that both it and her reaction to his pointing it out have, “What I can do is try to lessen the pain of your day to day life. My most trusted friends are the only ones who shall be guarding you from now on. Obviously, it is not the same as being away from here, but we can, at least, give you what little freedoms we can get away with offering you. See here,” he says, reaching into his armour to pull out the food.</p><p> </p><p>Moving so quickly in a way that hides his hands from her is another mistake, she starts to shake again, immediately resuming her efforts to keep as far away as possible. Oliver feels a spike of fear at losing her calm demeanour when he is so close to helping her for the first time, to taking his first steps to gaining her trust. He wants to go back in time and make himself handle it better but there is no way for him to do that, all that he can do is push on and hope that the offer of sustenance is enough to convince her to let him provide her meal.</p><p> </p><p>Hands closing around the food package, he swiftly holds them both up for her again, trying not to wince as he sees her recoil at the sight of him holding something, “It’s okay! It’s okay!” he tries to show her that it is just food, “It can’t hurt you, look.” He knows that moving again is a bad idea, but he needs to prove to her that it is only an offering of food and not something that will harm her before she harms herself. Unwrapping the package, he lays it on the floor with the cloth protecting the food from the dirt and settles back on his haunches to wait for her to look and see. It takes a while, and a lot of patience but eventually she does.</p><p> </p><p>Still, he waits, letting her look and see what he has brought her on her own, and waiting for her to stop her movements again by talking, “It’s not much.” He says, “But it was a last-minute scavenging trip when John said all you’d had today was a little bread. We will do our best to bring more in the future – as much as we can without raising suspicion. Fortunately, John and I… and I suppose Ray too, are large men, so we can get away with taking extra food under the pretence that we will be needing it ourselves.”</p><p> </p><p>For the first time since he laid eyes on her, she actually relaxes. Her legs go limp, resting against the floor and she even leans forwards to investigate, eyes darting between the food and Oliver. “I’m going to push it in a little so that you can reach it, is that okay?” he asks. When she makes no sign of refusal, he slowly moves the food through the bars and towards her.</p><p> </p><p>Moving back to lean against the bars of the cell opposite hers, he watches as she pulls the cloth holding the bread and chicken towards her and inspects it. She presses on the bread several times, watching it spring back each time gleefully. It is fresh bread, and she must not have had access to anything so fresh in so long, with as little regard as Darhk has for her. Something so simple makes her so happy and Oliver cannot decide whether to be delighted that she finds such joy in the little things or disgusted that something so small could be the best thing that she has known for however long it must have been since her capture.</p><p> </p><p>But she does not take a bite, she just sniffs tentatively at it all, inspecting every surface before placing it back on the cloth. Once each piece of chicken and the entire hunk of bread have been thoroughly looked over, she regards him distrustfully. A moment passes with her eyes entirely focused on him and Oliver temporarily forgets how to breathe. She is the first to break the contact, allowing Oliver to regain his function, and she slides the food back to where he had left it before sitting back in her corner – wings in a far more natural position this time – and looking at him expectantly.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver is confused for a moment, wondering why the obviously starving girl would refuse the chance to eat something until it dawns on him. “Oh!” he exclaims, “Oh, are you worried that I poisoned it or something?” he asks, “I swear, I didn’t.” her eyes narrow at him, disbelieving.</p><p> </p><p>She still says nothing but looks down at the food again before recapturing his gaze. “Here.” He says, “If I eat a little – just a little – first will that prove that it’s okay?” she keeps looking at him and he takes that as an affirmative. “Okay, I’m going to let you choose which piece I eat from, so you know it’s okay.” She still does not move, but when he points at one piece, her eyes narrow again in displeasure, so he moves onto another, and then another, and then another until he is on the second to last, and largest piece of chicken.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll tear a piece off the outside and I’ll take some from the middle, but I don’t want to have all of this because you need it yourself.” No reaction, which he is learning is her version of a yes. “And I’ll do the same with the bread.” He is careful to keep his takings small, so that there is still most of it remaining for her, and then he resettles against the opposite cell. She takes the cloth back into her corner, but still does not eat, just watching him. He supposes that she is waiting for something to happen.</p><p>*************************</p><p>A full half an hour is spent with the two of them just watching one another in silence, Oliver not wanting to do anything to upset her before she has eaten something. And then finally, at last, she tears herself from him and picks up some chicken, biting into it. Oliver delights when she is unable to contain a small squeak of pleasure at the taste.</p><p> </p><p>When he is sure that she is entirely distracted by her food, he begins to talk again, “So, as I was saying earlier,” he starts, watching for any reaction but receiving nothing, “Myself and my five most trusted allies will be your guards from now on.” Still no reaction, but Oliver knows that she is listening, and he knows that she understands him. In that half an hour of observation, he had plainly seen what he had spotted the very first time he saw her. Intelligence. A lot of it, for her to have the brilliance to know to wait before eating the food herself shows that she knows that there are slow acting poisons out there, and that she has the control to wait to check.</p><p> </p><p>Why she is mute and why her initial, reflexive reactions are nearly feral when she is so bright, he can only speculate and he does not like the explanations he is theorising, but her cleverness cannot be denied. She may be hiding it, and she is possibly hiding it intentionally, but to him it is there clear as day.</p><p> </p><p>“We will be guarding you in shifts.” He continues, “Ray and Rory are taking the first shift – the morning shift. Ray is clever, like you, but he is not always the best fighter. Rory isn’t the strongest of us all, but he is an excellent fighter. I admit that they are probably the weakest team, and my least trusted, but that is why I put them on the morning shift. It is the one where we will be least active and where there will be the least threat to you, by my calculations.</p><p> </p><p>“Digg and Lyla have the afternoon and evening shift.” He informs her, “Though if there is anybody other than the six of us present, you have to call Lyla Lucas. She is part of the army, you see, and if anybody knew she was a woman she would be strictly punished. As would the rest of us. You would like her though, she’s an incredible fighter and very headstrong and Digg might look intimidating because of how huge he is, but he’s a kind man. And don’t get the wrong idea, when it comes to John and Lyla, Lyla is the one in charge. They’re are a couple, but they have to keep it a secret so they cannot marry. They have twins, Sara and John Junior, but we call him JJ.” He can see that her eating is slowing, only a little chicken and bread left, and she is carefully taking in and storing away all of the information that he is offering her.</p><p> </p><p>Telling her about Lyla is both a tactical move and one that he does not believe he could have resisted. He is determined not to lie to her, he does not know if he <em>could</em> lie to her even if he wanted to, but he also knows that telling her about Lyla is giving her a degree of power. He is sharing a secret to show his own trust in her in the hopes that she will know that she can trust him in return.</p><p> </p><p>“And finally, Roy and I are taking the night shift. Roy is a little stubborn and can be angry at times, but he is a good kid and a good man and he’ll keep you as safe as he can. And me… I will protect you. I promise. When there are other people around, I might act like them towards you, and I might seem like your enemy but I promise I am not. I’m on your side, I just have a role to play.”</p><p> </p><p>She has finished eating and is looking at him again, though with a little less wariness this time. He smiles at her.</p><p> </p><p>“Can I ask your name?” he tries, only to receive a scowl and a silent snarl in response, “Okay.” He placates, “That is okay if you don’t want to tell me. I can wait, I’d just like to have a name to call you by.”</p><p> </p><p>He thinks on it, “I think, if you are unwilling to tell me otherwise, I shall have to come up with a name by which to call you.” Her head cocks to the side, Oliver is unsure whether it is in annoyance or curiosity as to what he may come up with, but the reaction charms him. She is adorable, beautiful, endearing. He can already feel himself becoming attached. It also makes him relax enough to allow a teasing inflection into his tone, “I shall have to think on it, these things cannot be rushed, you know? I will need to spend a little more time with you before I can decide what name is appropriate.” Her wings ruffle and he could swear that he sees her huffing in annoyance at his purposeful delay, but he contains the joyous laugh that tries to bubble out when he does.</p><p>*************************</p><p>She seems slightly more amenable to him, and Oliver is more than willing to take advantage of her allowing him to be in her presence whilst he can, so he sits with her. He talks about everything he can, from briefly mentioning his family to the tamer events that happened during his time at war to his friends and even his childhood. Oliver is not much of a talker, usually, and rarely tells anybody anything about himself beyond what is absolutely necessary, but something about her makes him want to open up. She is so silent, she just sits watching him cautiously, but evidently curious as he tells her about the first time that he held Thea but he feels like she wants to say things too, he feels like he is having a conversation. So, he keeps going and watches her relax more and more until she is curled up as comfortably as she can be on her rags, back merely resting against the wall rather than pressing into it.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver briefly wonders how her wings can be comfortable like that but gets the impression that she will not take kindly to him asking her about that sort of thing. She had not even taken kindly to him asking her name, after all. Instead, he keeps his questions to himself, storing them in the back of his mind for the future as he holds on to the hope that she will open up herself when she is ready.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Hours pass with no word from Roy, and they slip into a comfortable silence, willing to just be in one another’s company.</p><p> </p><p>After a short while, Oliver spots something, “What is that?” He asks, spotting a glint of colour hidden in the dreariness of the rags that she has been given in some poor excuse for a bed. For a brief second, he sees her eyes fill with fear again and then they are covered by a mass of dirty white as her wings draw around her and she withdraws once again, hiding both herself and the yellow something from him.</p><p> </p><p>“Hey!” he reassures her, “Hey, it’s okay. What did I say? I am not going to hurt you. I’m not going to punish you for anything. I swear.” Slowly, she lowers her wings again, and he sees that her body is now hunched around her hands where they are clasped together at her far too small belly. She raises her hands, still far enough behind the bars that he would have to unlock and open them if he wanted to touch her. Cradling whatever it is like she is holding something as precious as a diamond, she reveals to him the slightly wilted flowers of the posy he had left her. The daffodils within it just as bright as ever.</p><p> </p><p>“My posy.” He breathes, heart leaping to see her so protective over his small gift. Her hands close back around it and retreat to the safety of her bosom and he realises that he had used the possessive to refer to the flowers, “It’s okay.” He assures her, “I left them for you. I wanted you to have them. They’re a gift.” Her head tilts confusedly, even more incapable of comprehending this small act of kindness than his offering of food.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you like them?” he asks and then his heart just about stops as she nods. <em>She nods at him</em>. His heart skips a beat, breath catching in his chest. It is the first time that she has directly communicated with him and he feels as if he will never be the same. She still looks wary, unwilling to believe him so easily and he racks his brain for some way to prove himself. Thinking on the limp and slightly browning cuttings, the idea comes to him.</p><p> </p><p>Rummaging around in his pockets and trying to hide how pleased he is to see that she does not immediately shrink away from him when his hands disappear into the fabric this time, he tells her, “They’re dying, those flowers. Soon they’ll be gone.” Her eyes fill with tears at the thought, and he rushes to continue, “But how about we make a deal?” he asks. She looks perplexed, “You give me those flowers back,” at this, she does make a hasty retreat as she fears the delicate plants being taken from her, “And I’ll give you these to hold on to.” Finally, he pulls from his pocket a small bunch of lavender – his chosen posy for the day. He is intent on keeping his promise to Raisa, no matter how little exposure he will, in truth, have to the plague.</p><p> </p><p>Longing fills her eyes as she spots the strong, purple blossoms. Releasing it from the confines of his pocket has already had a decidedly positive effect on the smell in the air, as pungent as the plant is, and Oliver smiles. “Here.” He pushes the bunch into the cell so that she can reach it without having to touch him, “You can have this, and I’ll take the one from yesterday and I’ll dry it out and then as soon as it’s dry, I’ll bring it back here for you and you can keep it for as long as you want without worrying that it is going to rot away. And, if you want, I can do the same to the lavender once it needs it.”</p><p> </p><p>Eying him suspiciously, she shifts forwards again, hand moving almost faster than he can process so that she can snatch up the lavender. Oliver wonders whether her speed is a natural reflex or one trained into her after one too many occasions of people taking things away from her. He hopes for the former; he fears that the latter is the more likely case.</p><p> </p><p>Tentatively, she moves the hand holding the daffodil containing posy away from her body, stretching out towards him. Oliver is careful to keep his hands visible and far from her, on the other side of the iron bars that separate them, so as not to spook her. She hesitates a little, once her hand is hovering over a spot just within his reach, and then like she has made a decision and needs to act upon it before she changes her mind, she lets go, leaving the scuffed-up flowers on the floor.</p><p> </p><p>With a smile at her that he hopes is kind and assuring, he scoops them back up, making a show of his careful handling of them. She watches, wary, eyes narrowed for any sign of him not treating the delicate petals with the respect they deserve, and buries her nose in the lavender, sighing contentedly as the scent overwhelms her.</p><p> </p><p>Just as he is finishing tucking the delicate petals into his recently emptied pocket, a knock comes from the door Roy is behind. His angel flinches, recoiling at the sound and starting to tremble when Roy speaks, “Oliver. Now.” His terse voice sounds, filling Oliver with trepidation.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m sorry, my angel.” He apologises, “I have to go before they see me in here with you. I will be back as soon as I can, promise. And I’ll be right outside for the next hour and tomorrow too, even if I can’t come in.”</p><p> </p><p>Doleful blue eyes watch him as he leaves, heart breaking to see her so scared again after he had managed to keep her calm for so long, but he has no choice. He slips out just in time, closing and bolting the door behind him as he takes his position, looking for all the world like he has not spent the last few hours sat on the ground opposite an angel. The monk Roy had heard passes their tunnel, looking at them just once before continuing down another path but Oliver still does not risk going back in again in the last hour of his shift. It is too dangerous. He will not risk her suffering if he gets caught.</p><p> </p><p>Even if his heart breaks to think of her suffering alone in the dark, only a paltry lavender posy to keep her company.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thank you to anyone who has been patient for this past year and is still here! I hope the wait was worth it. The next chapter will be up soon and it's a big one. The title is marigold.</p><p>No spoiler triggers this chapter.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. marigold</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>marigold : a portent of cruelty; where the marigold grows, there will be despair; a gift of marigold is always a gift of sorrow</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Okay, first of all, thank you so much to everyone who stuck around a whole year waiting for chapter II and to everyone who gave this a shot for the first time this week. The support has been so encouraging and wonderful to have after not having posted anything in a couple of months. Secondly, I am so sorry. I still can't believe I wrote this and I definitely can't believe that I made it the third chapter but I promise that this is about as gruesome and difficult as this fic will get. Things get better from here. They get bad again too, but not in the same way. That's about all I can say without spoilers but please mind the tags, remember what I wrote in my note on chapter II and read the trigger warnings. If there's any chance of you being triggered by anything, I have written a summary of the chapter below so you know what to avoid/can know what happened without reading this chapter, and I have clearly signposted the parts of the chapter that you may wish to avoid (the first half is actually quite nice!) I procrastinated both writing and editing this chapter and had to watch S3 scenes to psyche myself up, but it had to happen and we can move on from here on out.</p><p>Please forgive any mistakes as I could only bring myself to read this through once so it's only had one edit.</p><p>Let's pretend that there would be access to loads of marigolds in mid-fourteenth century England for this chapter, okay? In fact, let's just start imagining that a whole host of foliage could be found in mid-fourteenth century England in great abundance, regardless of the time of year it was because that's gonna really help this fic out ;)</p><p> </p><p>  <b>TRIGGER WARNINGS: extreme physical violence, neglect, abuse, graphic descriptions of violence, torture, graphic descriptions of torture, PTSD, cruelty, dehumanisation, forced nakedness.</b></p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>III Marigold</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>Oliver’s days begin to pass in an eager blur; his menial jobs, training his soldiers, checking on their posts, dealing with the clergy, all of it fades from consequence. During the hours that he spends in the grounds and halls of the monastery, he feels as if his days have never passed slower, the monotony of his routines dragging on. But once the night arrives, and he and Roy wind their way down to the dark underground reaches of the structure, all of the previous hours vanish from his mind, and he feels as if it has only been a minute since he left the morning before.</p><p> </p><p>Spending time with his angel has become the highlight of his life. In some ways, it is the only thing keeping him sane in the new role that he is playing within the walls of deception and secrecy and depravity that Slabside provides. Every night, after a brief conversation with John and Lyla updating him on the inactivity of the day around the cells, he slips past the heavy door and heads straight towards her cell. He brings her a package of food, whatever treats he can sneak away from the dining table and she gratefully takes it. She has still not uttered a single word to him, but he can see how she is beginning to trust him. After a little over a week, she had stopped making him eat some of the food first, finally believing that he has no intention to poison or otherwise punish her. She sits in the middle of her cell, rather than in the corner, where she can easily reach anything that he passes to her and she can pass whatever she wants back to him.</p><p> </p><p>It also means that she is within touching distance of him whenever they are sitting together. Though he is sorely tempted, he never reaches out to her. All that he wants is to feel how downy her feathers are, to wrap his arms around her starving form, to test whether her skin is as smooth as it looks, to cup her small face in his hand and see exactly how small she is compared to him. But he does not want to push her for anything before she is ready and is more than willing to wait for her to come to him first. It is also why he has not yet opened her cell to give her some more space. As much as he wants to, he does not want her to feel threatened by him removing the protective barrier of the iron between them, even if that barrier is designed more to keep her in than to keep him out.</p><p> </p><p>Besides, he gains no small sense of smug satisfaction when he receives Lyla’s daily report. According to her, Oliver is the only person with whom his angel is so calm. She still refuses food from Rory and Ray – who take it in turns to visit her – unless they have first tested it and refuses to leave her corner whenever they are in the room. She seems to be more comfortable with Rory but is struggling to warm up to either of them. With John and Lyla, she seems more curious and far more willing to interact – especially with Digg. Oliver speculates that she has found a kindred spirit in each of them. With Lyla, the strength and fortitude of a woman defying society to live on her own terms, which he suspects the angel would also do were she not being held captive. And John is so kind-hearted, and such a calming presence, just like he is sure she is. And the one time that Oliver reluctantly allowed Roy to go and see her instead of him, just to be fair to the younger man, she had apparently been more curious than scared. She had gone through the routine of huddling in the corner and making him eat the food, but Roy had described her behaviour as strange. Almost like the way that she had reacted had been more a routine than anything, but she had been more interested in watching him as if he were the curiosity and not her.</p><p> </p><p>But even with the curiosity that she is showing towards select other members of his team, she still refuses to relax for even a moment in their presences and their time keeping her company is usually kept short in order to honour this. But with Oliver, she has started to look downtrodden when the time comes for him to leave, something that makes his heart both skip in excitement and sink in sorrow as he knows that she will be mostly alone for the majority of the day. She even allows him to sit and talk to her, she does not flinch when he moves anymore, and he can see her poorly concealed reactions to what he says to her. He is learning to read her.</p><p> </p><p>He finds himself divulging more to her than he ever has to anyone before, even Digg and Tommy. He tells her stories of his childhood, he talks about Thea and how he thinks that she and his angel would get along quite well, if the glimpses at the teasing personality he has seen behind the winged girl’s stony façade are anything to go by. He tells her anything that he can think of, just to fill the silence, keeping only a few select things for himself. There is just something about her, something that relaxes and comforts him and makes him feel like he can open up in a way that he never thought he would be capable of doing. Maybe it is her silence and willingness to listen, but he thinks that it is more likely due to the lack of judgement he sees in her even when he confesses things that keep him shamefully awake at night. He can tell that she disapproves of some of his previous choices, and that she disagrees with some of his decisions. But she never judges him for them. It does something to him.</p><p> </p><p>She makes him want to be honest. And she lets him talk about everything he is comfortable to. Just like she lets him waste away hours trying to guess her name, suggesting nicknames that he could use in the meantime only to receive a glare or playful eyeroll in response. She even begins to interact in the little games that he begins to play with her, using a lump of chalk that John was disappointingly unsurprised to find in place of cheese in his nightly meal as a drawing implement for boards on the stony catacomb floors.</p><p> </p><p>And, without fail, she trustingly trades the previous day’s posy for a new one just before he leaves, eyes beseeching him to return the flowers he is in the careful process of pressing as soon as he can. Her fingers always lovingly caress the petals of whichever new blossom he offers her on that day. Completely unwilling to let her down at any time, he sets the flowers between the pages of a book as soon as he returns to his rooms and then, whilst training his men the next day, goes to the monks’ vast and exotic gardens to see what blooms most beautifully for him to bring some colour to his angel’s life.</p><p> </p><p>When he made his way towards her with a cut on his face (curtesy of John in a brief sparring session between their shifts with the soldiers) she had looked so concerned. It had given Oliver hope. If she is concerned for him, then she must care and if she cares, she must be learning to trust him. And hopefully that will mean that she will communicate with him one day.</p><p> </p><p>Each of his chosen soldiers ensures that they spend at least half an hour with her on each of their shifts. She is more receptive to that with certain members of the sextet but at least tolerates it with them all. Oliver wishes that he could pass the hours down there sat opposite her just like he had that first time, but he also knows that he cannot risk being seen and the longer he spends with her, the more likely that is to happen. Even if that were not a concern, they need to always keep at least one member on guard, both to maintain the image of them aiding in her imprisonment and to keep a lookout for whoever is on mission. Be that mission keeping her company or searching the catacomb for any hints or clues of Darhk’s operations.</p><p> </p><p>As the days wear on, he does begin notice her eagerly checking to see if he is returning her first posy, patience wearing thin. Oliver is grateful that he thought to explain that the process will take two to three weeks because he knows that is what is maintaining her trust in him, and he knows that he will lose that trust in the blink of an eye if she does not receive the daffodils by the end of that time. He has no intentions of letting her down though. Even though he knows that none of them will be ready yet, he checks every day anyway, itching to bring her gift back and prove himself to her. Oliver harbours a secret hope that she will talk to him once he has shown her that he keeps his word. He is desperate to hear her voice, certain that it must be as enchanting as everything else about her is.</p><p> </p><p>If she does not talk to him once he returns the daffodil posy to her, he will not give up. He will keep going until she does more than nod and shake her head at some of his questions and until she does, he will keep feeling his heart leap every time she reacts. Likely, his heart will leap every time she speaks from then on too.</p><p> </p><p>But other than his life affirming interactions with her, nothing is happening. So little, in fact, that Oliver is beginning to grow more concerned about what is <em>not</em> occurring than with what is. Because something <em>has</em> to be happening. There is no way that Darhk is just at Slabside Monastery and doing nothing when he has a winged woman locked up beneath the building and God knows what else happening behind closed doors.</p><p> </p><p>It is what is going on behind those doors, the ones that bar even Oliver, that he knows are the ones to be most worried about, and they are the ones that he cannot find. And if Darhk can leave an angel crumpled in her cell for more than two full weeks without so much as a visit, then whatever else he is doing must be truly terrible.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Oliver’s world changes for the second time less than three weeks on a day that he had been looking forwards to for a long time. He has made enough progress with his angel that she is almost, <em>almost</em> communicating with him verbally – he has caught her making audible huffs at his antics in attempting to engage her and once or twice, he could swear that he has witnessed her on the verge of making a retort before catching herself.</p><p> </p><p>The day has been a long day of training for him, his mind weighted down by the book that he carries with him from the moment that he awakened. He is distracted the whole time, even more so than he has been by the desire to get to her every day over the last few weeks, because he cannot keep his mind away from how she might react to him when he goes to her. How things may be different this time.</p><p> </p><p>Several times in the hours that he instructs his soldiers, he spots Roy rolling his eyes at his behaviour and must make a concerted effort to stop checking the book every five seconds so that nobody grows suspicious. Roy finds it annoyingly amusing, and mocks Oliver as they make their way down to the cells after having finally been relieved by a freshly rested Ray and Rory. He shuts up when Oliver threatens him with a beating during their next sparring session but does not lose the smug smirk and Oliver just knows that the boy wants to make a comment about how distracted he has been during their training sessions recently. He also knows that Roy has just enough of a sense of self-preservation to keep his mouth shut, because Oliver may not be entirely present thanks to how busy he has been and how many of his thoughts have been leading back to a certain winged captive, but he is still known as one of the most deadly warriors in the whole of the English army – in the whole of the continent, even. There is a reason that he is so widely feared.</p><p> </p><p>When they get down there, it is chaos. Or as much chaos as a monastery primarily inhabited by people who have taken a vow of silence can be, at least. The quiet of the catacombs, broken only by the soft footsteps of the steady stream of monks, that Oliver has grown to expect is no more, replaced instead by a writhing crowd that he has not even borne witness to in the overground halls of the monastery. There are monks darting around, gliding in that eerily peaceful way of theirs from door to door and far more hurried than he has ever seen them before. And dotted amongst the quiet holy men, the Archbishop’s own people are running to and fro, looking far less peaceful than their silent brethren.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver and Roy weave their way through the frantic mass, pushing deeper into the tunnels with the expectation that in the further recesses of the catacombs there will be less movement, but as they get down there, the chaos only increases. Finally, Oliver spots Digg’s imposing figure outside the solid, bolted door and Lyla’s smaller body beside him. The angel’s tunnel is the only one that is empty of movement and Oliver breathes a sigh of relief to see that things with her are still as he expected.</p><p> </p><p>Trying not to look hurried, he rushes towards his friends, “John, Lyla, what’s happening?” he asks, hushed.</p><p>“We don’t know.” Lyla responds, worry in her eyes, “It was a little more busy than usual when Johnny and I came down here but nothing significant. We were able to deliver her food without much issue, though I decided not to stick around for too long for fear that the slight increase in activity would result in a greater chance of somebody coming along this way and getting curious. Though the activity did prove helpful in disguising my investigating.” She gestures to where one of Darhk’s men is scuttling past.</p><p>“Around two hours ago, all of this started to happen.” Digg informs the other men, “We have no idea why, but Lyla had to return from her scouting early to avoid somebody coming and asking too many questions regarding her absence. We haven’t heard anything from anybody since we got down here, we’ve just been watching it get increasingly manic.”</p><p> </p><p>Oliver bites his lip, “But nobody has approached you?” he checks, “Nobody has given you any orders or come down here?”</p><p>“No.” Lyla affirms, “But I don’t know whether that is a good thing or not.”</p><p>Nodding, his jaw set, Oliver dismisses them, “If you’re able to hear anything on your way back up, try and let me know if it’s important. If not, let me know in our meeting later.”</p><p>“Good luck.” John says, and then he and Lyla leave.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver looks over at Roy, “Let’s hope for an uneventful night.” He says, sending a silent prayer up that it will be.</p><p>“Are you going to…?” Roy tilts his head at the prison door besides them.</p><p>“No. At least… not until things calm down.” He infuses his voice with certainty that he does not possess, trying to sound confident that things will indeed calm down when he actually has no idea what the night will bring. “It’s too risky until then. Neither of us can leave our posts.”</p><p>“Yes, sir.”</p><p>*************************</p><p>In the next hour and a half, things only seem to be growing more active rather than less, in spite of the fact that midnight is nearing. Oliver twitches, agitated as he watches the bustle. All that he wants to do is open the door behind him so that he can see her. His hand rests on the small book, caressing the pages lightly and he does all that he can: waits and hopes. As he waits, he strains his ears to try and hear a sound of her but the combination of the thick door and the noise of hundreds of feet scuffling across stone keeps him from hearing a sound. He wonders what she is thinking, if she is wondering where he is and why he has not visited her yet and his heart clenches at the thought of her sitting there, alone, and worrying about him.</p><p> </p><p>What must she think? That he has abandoned her? That he is merely delayed? That something terrible has happened to him? He would like to believe that she knows he would never abandon her, but the truth is that she might think he has. Even if he feels as if he has known her for his entire life, in truth they could count on their own two hands how many days have passed since their first meeting and she does not fully trust him yet. The thought that she is sat there believing herself to be abandoned makes him want to hit something, but he just manages to restrain himself from doing so.</p><p>*************************</p><p>It is half an hour before midnight when everything comes to an abrupt stop. Seemingly within mere moments, all the monks vanish from sight and the cacophony of feet quietens to just a few trampling steps. Within the next fifteen minutes, the Archbishop’s followers follow in the monks’ footsteps and disappear. Oliver and Roy stand there for five minutes, waiting, the only sounds in the pervasive silence of the underground their own breathing.</p><p> </p><p>“Where did they all go?” Roy whispers, afraid to break the silence but unable to contain his question.</p><p>“I don’t know.” Oliver admits, “I don’t know what’s happening.” Unbidden, a little of his frustration bleeds into his tone and his voice comes out as a growl.</p><p>“Are you going insi-”</p><p>“No.” Oliver hisses, “Quiet, Roy.” His ears are straining to pick up any sort of noise, the complete silence almost frightening in its intensity. He cannot just relax and believe that it is all over until he has evidence, the chaos ending so quickly is unbelievable to him.</p><p> </p><p>For another ten minutes, he stands there on full alert, privately planning to go and visit his angel after midnight should things remain quiet. And then he catches the sound.</p><p> </p><p>Footsteps.</p><p> </p><p>They draw closer to he and Roy, close enough for Oliver to be able to count the footfalls of five different people. Five people he never wanted to see together in this place. They round the corner, walking straight towards Oliver and Roy.</p><p> </p><p>No. Towards <em>her</em>. Towards his angel, his Honeysuckle, the light of his life at Slabside. They are coming for her.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver gulps, hardening his nerve and supressing the terrified tremors that threaten to overtake him. What are they doing? Is this why everything had been so busy before? What do they want? Why are they here? Why now?</p><p> </p><p>And worst of all; what are they going to ask <em>him</em> to do? He never wants to find out, but he knows that he is going to whether he likes it or not. He has no choice.</p><p> </p><p>In that moment, Oliver has to make a decision: to fight back right now and lose everything just in the hopes that he can keep her from whatever unknown thing is about to happen, or to stand back and let it happen so that he can be sure of stopping it from happening again, of stopping it from happening to anybody else. So that he completes his mission. It is a moment of paralysis, time slowing as he watches Darhk slowly draw ever closer and his mind flashes through the possibilities.</p><p> </p><p>A pair of warm brown eyes, light and wonderful, shine up at him from his memories, even as he pictures her soulful blues.</p><p> </p><p>Everything in him aches to take up arms, to defend her. He has never known an urge quite like it, a whole new brand of protectiveness bursting to life inside him, his heart thudding a double beat that he is convinced echoes her own. Oliver has always been protective of that which he cares about, and it is that thought that reminds him of where he is and why. That thought that allows him to remember another surge of protectiveness that lives within him, which allows his rational mind to win. He makes a decision, one that he hopes will be better for everybody in the long run but that he knows will be infinitely worse for him and especially for her in the present.</p><p> </p><p>He stays put.</p><p>*************************</p><p>“Your Excellency.” Oliver greets Darhk, standing straight.</p><p>“My Lord.” Darhk responds.</p><p>“Are you here to see the prisoner?” Oliver questions stiffly, fighting to keep his voice blank of any emotion beyond professionalism.</p><p>A knowing grin spreads across Darhk’s thin lips, “Yes. I was rather hoping that you and your soldier here would be willing to help us to escort the creature to an appointment.”</p><p> </p><p>It is not a request, nor is it a mere hope. Darhk is ordering them as blatantly as he can get away with ordering Oliver to do anything. Oliver clenches his jaw, “Of course, it is our duty.”</p><p>“Excellent.” Darhk claps his hands together, “Let’s get going then.” His smile is unnerving, but not nearly so much as after he tucks a thick nosegay of orange marigolds into his collar so that they slightly cover the smile and hover beneath his nose. Something to maintain the pretence that she is contagious. It makes Oliver bristle with fury, especially when he declines one himself on the grounds that it would inhibit his ability to do his job, but he manages to step back and allow Roy to open the door so that he can lead Darhk inside, nonetheless.</p><p> </p><p>“Of course, it would be ever so helpful if you could stick around until we’re done. You could keep an eye on things, ensure that it doesn’t escape, help us return it here afterwards, that sort of thing.” Darhk says cheerfully, entirely out of place in the cheerless dungeon.</p><p>“Of course.” Oliver replies, voice blank.</p><p> </p><p>Once Darhk stops talking, Oliver becomes aware of another sound. Sniffling. Quiet cries coming from that one occupied cell. Coming from his angel.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****PHYSICAL ABUSE AND DEHUMANISATION*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>He barely manages to stop himself from rushing towards her, his breath coming faster in his chest at the sound. They finally stop before her and Oliver wants to fall to the ground and cry with her. The cell is a mess, rags strewn around it in a distressed manner, as if she has been writhing in her poor excuse for a bed in pain, limbs thrashing. And she is huddled in her corner, even more contorted and painfully desperate to escape than Oliver has ever seen her as she sobs at the sight of Darhk.</p><p> </p><p>Her eyes are puffy and red, letting Oliver know that she has been in distress for a good long while. All alone as he stood sentry. As he performed his duties as her jailor. She is entirely in the thralls of a fit, her small body shuddering with violent spasms timed with every pass of Darhk’s disdainful gaze over her. Oliver’s fists clench, pain overwhelming his heart to see her like this, hysteric with terror.</p><p> </p><p>She knows what is coming.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver simultaneously wishes that he did too, and that he never has to find out.</p><p> </p><p>With two fingers, Darhk motions two of the men he has brought along forwards. One carries a key, identical to the one in Oliver’s own possession, which he inserts into the lock on the angel’s cell door and turns. The expensive mechanism clangs ominously as it releases and, as if the sound is some sort of trigger, the angel immediately begins to moan. Terrible whimpers escape her lips, her groans sounding as if she is in agony. For a second, Oliver naïvely convinces himself that she may be reacting in this way because the twisted position that she is holding her body in has caused for something to strain inside. But then the men begin to advance on her, menacing even to Oliver’s eyes in their dark robes, the only splash of colour the bright orange of the foreign flowers, and her whines become more and more frantic in time with her thrashing.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver’s fingers begin to twitch, the pad of his thumb rubbing against his index and middle fingers as they itch to grab one of his arrows and nock it. Visions fill his mind of it flying straight into the hearts of these men who have clearly been tormenting this angel for long enough that she just expects pain at the sight of them. It is then that Oliver finally pays attention to what they are holding. Some sort of chains, a complicated web far in excess of what would be needed to hold a little thing like her down. They rattle, links clinking together with each cautious step that the men take.</p><p> </p><p>They are taking their time to approach her, evidently scared. By what, Oliver cannot fathom. The kind, sweet girl he is beginning to know would not hurt a fly, and she certainly does not have the strength to put up much of a fight after her long malnutrition. That does not stop her from trying though. Oliver’s chest swells with pride as, in the moment that the men are within grabbing distance of her, her spasms become far more controlled and purposeful. Her wings swirl around her body like a large, feathered shield, the dark tips sweeping at the men’s legs in an effort to unbalance them. She is remarkable. To be able to put up such a fight – one that has her enemies stumbling and on the verge of a loss – even in the conditions that she has been living through is something that most would be incapable of. He thinks that she might just be the strongest person he knows.</p><p> </p><p>And all the while he is standing mutely, doing nothing to help her.</p><p> </p><p>For a moment, he thinks that she might win. The men are on their knees, bowed by the powerful wings in the small space, but then she gives a lurch, and he sees that one of the chains is looped around her right wing, crumpling it inwards and incapacitating it. They have her on the end of the chain and give it a tug, sending her sprawling across the floor painfully. Oliver begins to lunge forwards, ready to rescue her. Ready to give every other man in the room a gruesome end, but then there is a pressure at his chest, and he sees Roy’s hand holding him back.</p><p> </p><p>Remembering himself, Oliver tries to arrange his expression from the burning hatred he is showing and into one more apathetic. He does a bad job but thinks that he will get away with it if Darhk assumes that the revulsion seeping through is for his angel and not for the Archbishop himself. What is even harder to stop is his urge to tear the hands manhandling the wonderful woman from the arms they are attached to. His entire body aches with the effort it takes to hold himself back as they practically hobble her with the chain, binding her wings in a completely unnatural way to her body, tethering her arms to her chest and leaving not even enough slack for her to be able to breathe properly, let alone for her to move.</p><p> </p><p>Once they have her tied, she just lies on the floor, painting an image of abuse and sorrow unlike anything Oliver has ever seen before, not even when he was at war. She is shivering so violently that the chains clank together as she does. He just wants to cover her in his robes. To rip the chains from her body and wrap her up before a warm fire and hold her within his arms for days on end. He wants to feed her and to give her a large, clean, comfortable room filled with the delicate flowers she so adores that she can live in. He wants to free her.</p><p> </p><p>Only a glance at Roy, to see him looking almost as horrified as Oliver feels, reminds him of the mission. Of his decision. Discretely, he reaches out a hand to clasp around the young soldier’s forearm. A gesture of solidarity and comfort. For as little as they are able to do in this very moment, they will be able to do so much more in the future. One day, they will put a stop to this and to everything else that Darhk is getting away with doing. Even the thought of that does not make watching her bright blue eyes dull as she comes to terms with the fact that there will be no escape from what is coming next – watching her lose hope – any easier. But it is more than enough for Oliver to be filled with the determination to redouble his efforts. To speed up the timeline. He <em>has</em> to save her.</p><p> </p><p>He feels convinced that Darhk is trying to test him when the man begins to walk out of the cell block, back straight and a pleased look partially hidden by the flowers on his face, and the men who tied up his angel begin to follow, each tugging on a free length of chain that attaches to her. They drag her along the floor, ignoring her cries and her clear pain as they go. But Oliver cannot ignore it. He follows the five so-called holy men, walking just behind her prone form, unable to take his eyes from hers.</p><p> </p><p>She looks at him accusatorily, betrayal written across her tear stained, scraped face. Her wings try to shift beneath her, straining against their metal bindings and failing. The failure makes her break out in fresh tears and she looks away from him, fear taking over her as she struggles to writhe in pain. Oliver is unable to contain a whimper when she is dragged down a step, her body violently bouncing down the ledge and a small crunch sounding from her wing that makes her cry out.</p><p> </p><p>His whimper regains her attention, and she turns her pain filled eyes upon him, shooting daggers of blame into his heart without saying a word. In that moment, Oliver wishes that he had not spent the last few weeks learning to pick up on her non-verbal cues so diligently. If he had not, then he would not be able to understand the resigned disgust on her face. He would not be able to tell that she is hating herself for beginning to trust him when she now believes that he is no better than the rest. He would not be able to agree with every thought running through her mind and broadcasting through her eyes. Because anybody who would be willing to stand by and watch this happen to her must be a loathsome creature, regardless of their good intentions. Oliver slips into familiar self-loathing even as he silently implores her to see reason, to understand his side of the story, to know that he would not be letting this happen if he thought that he could do enough to stop it.</p><p> </p><p>None of his planning matters. Nothing that he intends to do in the future is of any consequence if it means that she is going to suffer like this. Standing aside and allowing it to happen is tantamount to him causing her suffering with his own hands, as far as he is concerned. He hates himself for it.</p><p>*************************</p><p>The five-minute walk from her cell to Darhk’s destination is the hardest five minutes of Oliver’s life. Nothing else compares. Not the times that he has been held captive himself, not his torture at the hands of his enemies, not any of the losses he has suffered. He can imagine no greater pain than being forced to walk alongside an angel – <em>his angel</em> – as she is dragged along the tomb lined tunnels of the Slabside catacombs like she is worth less than the dirt on the floor that is scraping her skin.</p><p> </p><p>The room that Darhk leads them to is filled to the brim with the same orange marigolds that he is wearing. Oliver thinks that he has never hated a plant more than he hates this one, its garish colour no more pleasant than the dull, sandy grey of the limestone that the room is cut from in the pallid light of the torches. It feels horribly suited to the scene he is living through.</p><p> </p><p>They come to a stop before a stone table in the centre of the room. Oliver gulps as he sees the leather straps that attach to chains bolted into the floor where they lie around the table. An idea comes to him, a repulsive thought that makes his bones shake with fear, about what he is about to bear witness to. What he is about to live through. What she is about to experience. The thought is almost too much for him to handle, and he cannot keep himself together as he meets her eyes again, a question in his own, and the terror in hers, the acknowledgement, lets him know that he is right. That the worst is about to happen right in front of him.</p><p> </p><p>It is all that he can do to suppress his mournful moan.</p><p> </p><p>“My Lord?” Darhk pipes up, looking expectantly at Oliver as he forces his eyes from the despairing girl on the floor and up to face the one causing her such despair.</p><p>“Yes?” he manages to croak out.</p><p>“If you wouldn’t mind, could you aid my assistants?”</p><p> </p><p>Oliver finds himself nodding, barely aware that it is his own muscles causing the movement. He is numb to his own body as it steps forwards, walking towards the small woman on the floor and crouching beside her. His hands reach out, independent of his mind, and then they stop. A hair’s breadth away from her bare arm, they hesitate, his mind catching up to what he is doing, recognising the wide, fearful eyes staring at him, broken. His heart shatters, hair standing on end as he feels the cold eyes of the Archbishop on the back of his neck and then-</p><p> </p><p>He makes contact.</p><p> </p><p>Her skin is as smooth as he imagined, her body as tiny under his hands, her feathers even softer than he could have dreamt. And he hates it. He hates himself. He hates Darhk. He hates everything that is happening in that moment. This is not how he should have held her for the first time. He should have unlocked her cell at her request and stood back to let her out. He should have waited for her to come to him, for her to raise up on her bare feet so that she stood on her tiptoes, as high as possible but still so much smaller than him. He should have felt her skin for the first time as her arms encircled his neck in an embrace, he should have experienced her downy feathers when she asked for him to embrace her back and his fingers wrapped around her large wings.</p><p> </p><p>Lifting her bound form from the dirty floor so that he can bind her to a stone slab is the opposite of what he had imagined. It is the worst way that he could have touched her for the first time, because the pain she is feeling and the heinous way that he is breaching her trust is something that destroys any possible enjoyment he could get from the moment. And this should have been a glorious moment for the both of them.</p><p> </p><p>He cannot focus on the silky texture of her skin, only on how cold it is, and how there are rocks embedded in several places. Her feathers do not feel like the softest thing he has ever touched, because they are twisted and snarled by the events of the night, the torment inside her being reflected on the outside. Her small body in his arms does not fill him with a sense of protectiveness but makes him feel like the monster that he is, about to mercilessly crush her beneath him. After all, he can tangibly feel her spirit being crushed as he lays her on the rock and allows Darhk’s men to deftly bind her to the table and release the chains that had been holding her.</p><p> </p><p>“Thank you, my Lord.” Darhk says as Oliver steps back, taking in the way that her entire body is laid bare by the spread-eagled position they have forced her into, her wings splayed helplessly beneath her, being pulled to the floor below. “If you would be so kind as to guard the door and ensure that nobody enters until my business is done, I would be most grateful.</p><p> </p><p>And despite everything that he has done to her since Darhk’s arrival, she still looks directly at him when Darhk asks him to leave. Her eyes are begging, one last gambit, one last shred of hope that he will help her. That he will stop Darhk. His heart screams at him, telling him to slice Darhk’s throat open and go to her, telling him to let Roy handle the other men in the room as he cuts through the leather straps and carries her to safety. His mind yells, telling him that something truly awful is about to happen, informing him of the blame he will bear when it does, but the loudest voice of them all is the one that speaks of his mission. The one that reminds him of Digg and Lyla and Rory and Ray somewhere far above, of the legions of clergy and soldiers that patrol the halls, of who he would have to fight to get her to freedom and who he would be leaving behind to suffer the same fate or worse.</p><p> </p><p>As much as he wants to give in, to give her what she so desperately needs and what his heart is calling for, he cannot. He knows all too well that, if he does, it will only be a temporary freedom and the repercussions will be so much worse. So, feet feeling heavier than if they were made of lead, he manages to break their eye contact, to nod briskly at Darhk, to turn and walk away, Roy in tow as the door slams shut and bolts behind him.</p><p> </p><p>He can hear her shrieks, terrified and entirely hopeless, echoing behind him. She wordlessly calls out for something, someone, anything to save her just beyond the door and he sinks to the floor. Destroyed.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Some time passes. Oliver has no idea how much. He can hear nothing except the shattering of his own heart as he remembers that final broken cry from his angel. She must hate him now.</p><p> </p><p>Roy stands beside him, still together enough to be alert as Oliver sits in a crumpled heap on the floor, knowing that what he has done today is unforgivable and he will never be able to earn her trust again. With each breath, he can feel the book that he had been so excited to take in to her all day pushing against his chest, directly over his heart. He deserves nothing, she will be right to never forgive him. He just left her to an unknown fate at the hands of a power-hungry sadist, who he suspects is unhinged. Unforgivable. Diabolical. Cruel.</p><p> </p><p>“Oliver.” Roy finally says, “Oliver, what are they… what are they going to do to her?” Oliver says nothing, “What do they want with her? Why are they treating her like this?” Oliver remains mute, “How could anybody do that to somebody else – an angel, no less? What is wrong with them? Do you think she’s going to be okay?”</p><p> </p><p>“I DON’T KNOW!” Oliver explodes, panting as he stands up directly in Roy’s face. “I don’t have a goddamned clue! You saw exactly what I saw, what do you think?” he barely keeps his voice low enough to stop it from traveling to the other side of the door where Darhk lurks, “All I know is that nothing good is happening in that room, and I didn’t take the chance to stop it.” His voice breaks, “I had the chance, but I didn’t take it and she knows that and- <em>God, her face</em>. She’ll never trust me again now.”</p><p> </p><p>“But if you just explain to her-”</p><p>Oliver snaps, “How am I supposed to explain anything to her if she won’t-”</p><p> </p><p>A <em>screech </em>rends through the air, a sound unlike any Oliver has ever encountered before. It tears through his brain, like it has come from within his mind rather than the outer world. It makes Oliver feel faint, his heart and head pounding in tandem, and he looks to Roy to find his friend doubled over with his hands around his ears in an attempt to keep the bloodcurdling sound out but to no avail.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver’s eyes dart around, searching for the source of the noise, but he is disorientated, unable to think clearly and he cannot make sense of anything. His hands reach out for the nearest solid object to find some purchase before he collapses and the first thing that they make contact with is solid and gnarled. Like wood. Like a wooden door.</p><p> </p><p>Like the door hiding his angel away from him in a room with her captors.</p><p> </p><p>The sound cuts out after what feels like an impossibly long time, Oliver’s ears ringing with an echo in its absence. He has no time to reorient himself as less than a second later another shriek comes, even more terrible than the first, and Oliver works it out. He makes the connection. His angel is behind that door, and she is the one making these awful sounds.</p><p> </p><p>They are hurting her. They are torturing her somehow, tearing from her cries of pain that no living creature should be capable of making, and they have done it before. This, whatever is happening behind that door, is what she has been so afraid of. It is what she has been waiting for him to do, to bring her to this room and let them do this to her – or worse, to do it himself. And today he confirmed her worst fears and handed her straight to those who have hurt her most.</p><p> </p><p>Her second scream breaks, the sound warbled by a sob. She sounds so alone, abandoned, hurt, sorrowful. She needed somebody to stand up for her, to protect her and instead Oliver just stood by and did nothing. No, worse, he walked with her to her doom and did nothing. He lifted her onto the table and made it easier for them to hurt her.</p><p> </p><p>Choking comes through from behind the door, her throat closing up after minutes of sustained agony, and Oliver finally loses his battle and collapses to his knees, guilt a destructive force within him. When the next howl starts up, telling a tale of vicious intent and pain beyond all measure, all rational thought leaves Oliver. All that he knows is that his angel is locked behind that door, being hurt beyond what any ordinary person should be able to survive, and he must get to her. <em>He has to stop it</em>.</p><p> </p><p>He fights his way to his feet, ignoring the splitting of his skull as she begins to wail again, and musters up enough strength to lean against the door and begin pounding on the wood, demanding attention from the occupants of the room. Roy spots what he is doing and manages to crawl towards the door and stand next to Oliver so that he can thump against the wooden barrier with Oliver.</p><p> </p><p>Nobody answers.</p><p> </p><p>Another cry sends shivers down Oliver’s spine, filling him with a new wave of desperation, be it his own or hers, and he takes a few steps back before flinging his own body at the lock, hoping beyond all hope that his body will be enough to smash through it. It is not, the door barely even rattles in its frame under the heavy pressure of Oliver himself, but he does not let that deter him. Again, and again, he throws himself against the iron and oak, kicking with all of his might, but still the door holds strong. His face is wet from the tears streaming from his eyes, from the perspiration gathering under his efforts and he is sure that if his heart tries to beat any faster it will give out under all of the stress and need that has it going at thrice its usual rate.</p><p> </p><p>The door holds strong.</p><p> </p><p>His angel begins to beg on the other side. No words still but her incoherent babbling is impossible to misinterpret. She wants them to stop, she just wants them to <em>stop hurting her</em>. She would trade anything if only the pain would stop. Oliver wants to call out, to tell her that he is coming and that he will stop the pain, but he knows that it would be useless. He may be trying to get to her, but there is no way inside the room. He cannot stop the pain; he cannot even promise that he can keep her from harm ever. And even if he could promise those things, she would not believe him. She will never believe him again.</p><p> </p><p>He makes as much of a racket as he physically can, fingers scraping at the door as if to gouge his way through it, garnering bruises and bloody cuts as his body forcefully makes contact with the handles and latches and solid mass before him. His fingernails begin to bleed, tearing away from his skin but he does not notice any of it. None of his physical pain can begin to compare to hers, to compare to what she must be going through that would elicit such screams from her. None of it can compare to the pain in his heart upon hearing those screams.</p><p> </p><p>A part of him is aware that he is yelling, his throat hoarse from his calls to be let in. He has just enough presence of mind to only be asking to get in, to ask what is happening in there, but he is sure that Darhk must pick up on the desperation in his tone. He is sure that Darhk must be suspicious, but he could not care less. He is willing to do whatever it takes to get that door open.</p><p>*************************</p><p>An eternity passes before he can comprehend anything beyond her awful cries, beyond her inconsolable sobbing. He is shouting inquiries to Darhk about what is happening and then a bolt clicks on the other side of the door, and he has just enough time to dry his tears and rearrange his face before he draws his sword, and the door opens. One of Darhk’s aids is on the other side, looking unperturbed and serene, his expression only wavering when he sees the deadly weapon Oliver is brandishing at him.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver has a fleeting fantasy of running the man through, of gutting him where he stands so carefree and apathetic to the agonised girl he has been torturing, but then Darhk comes into view asking “My Lord? What is it?” as if nothing is wrong and he turns his anger on his true enemy. Advancing into the room, murderous and fuming, Oliver has every intention of cutting Darhk into little pieces. He wants to make Darhk feel the same pain that he has caused an angel tenfold, and at his own hands. But before he gets the chance, she comes into view.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF TORTURE*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>Oliver thinks that he is going to throw up.</p><p> </p><p>He has never seen anything so utterly horrifying as what lies before him when he gets deep enough into that room, never suffered a sight so ungodly in his five years of war, in his twenty and seven years on the Earth. Oliver has tortured men; he has skinned an enemy alive to gain information and has kept a foreign general on the brink of death for hours. He hates himself for every one of those things, no matter how evil his enemies were, he still knows that he is a monster and that the blood on his hands will never be wiped clean.</p><p> </p><p>For years, he has believed that nothing could ever be as depraved as the acts that he has committed, that nobody could exceed the torture that he has caused others. He has been of the mind that there is nothing he could do to dirty his hands any more than he already has.</p><p> </p><p>He was wrong.</p><p> </p><p>So wrong. On every count. He thought that he understood what evil was, but he had no idea. In that moment, he believes that Darhk is the devil incarnate, for he sees no other way for the Archbishop to have done something so disgusting, so blasphemous, as what he is doing to the angel whom he holds captive.</p><p> </p><p>She is limp on the table, no strength left in her. Even her tormented cries have quietened in the wake of her exhaustion, and she is left whimpering miserably, breath rattling is she struggles to draw it in, nothing left in her. The floor looks like a bloodbath, scarlet stains splattered across everything from her wings to the walls to the men themselves and the space beneath where she lies is swimming with the liquid even as it continues to pour from her body. Marigolds float sickeningly in the vermillion pool where they have fallen to the ground, the garish orange speckled with rusting red. There is too much of it, no living creature should contain that much but she is still somehow shedding more.</p><p> </p><p>But the even that horror cannot compare to that of her body. She lies naked on the table, the flimsy shift she has worn since Oliver met her cut away and discarded to give Darhk access to her flesh. Her flesh that he has torn open. <em>Her body is open</em>.</p><p> </p><p>The skin of her chest has been peeled away, exposing her innards to the open air for Darhk’s inspection. Swathes of it have been cut away and are laid out on a table beside lumps of what Oliver recognises to be flesh. Her flesh. He cannot comprehend it, the sight such a shocking thing that he does not believe it to be real for a moment. But there she lies, destroyed besides a table of her own skin and organs and feathers and vials upon vials of her blood.</p><p> </p><p>The mutilation extends even to her wings, lax and raw and drooping in the pool of blood. She should be dead. Nobody could survive that. Oliver misjudged, he assumed that their interest in her would require her to be alive, but he was wrong. They have taken what they needed from her, and are now harvesting everything else that is left so that they can be done with her.</p><p> </p><p>This is why it was a secret. This is why. Dissection is prohibited even on animals and yet here is an Archbishop not only cutting open a creature but cutting a <em>living angel</em> for analysis. Head swimming, he thinks that he is about to pass out, eyes roving wildly around the room, unable to take the sacrilege before him in. But he must. Because it is his fault. Of course, most of the blame lies squarely on the shoulders if Darhk, who still holds a bloodied knife in hand as he smirks at Oliver, actually pleased with himself. And also, Darhk’s followers, who stood by and watched and possibly even helped. But Oliver is the one who could have protected her. Oliver is the one who decided to weight his mission and the ‘long run’ heavier than the potential of what could happen in this room. He is the one who underestimated Darhk and enabled him. And in his books, that makes him no better.</p><p> </p><p>His hands have never been bloodier. His conscience has never had so much upon it. He has never been more of a monster.</p><p> </p><p>He could have let her be killed. But somehow… <em>somehow,</em> he did not. Because there, even as she should already be lying dead on the table, she is still alive. Writhing against her bonds, and then Oliver witnesses a miracle.</p><p> </p><p>Before his very eyes, her skin begins to knit itself together. In the hollow pit where one of her lungs used to reside, another begins to form. Somehow, right in front of him, he is watching organs regrow and flesh heal in the span of less than a minute. It is a perfect process by no means. Her skin does its best to reattach, but there are some places where it has been peeled back too far for the pieces to be able to draw back together without assistance, the organs regain enough form to function, but are still small and have a lot of growing to do. The patches of skin that have been entirely removed have new growth coming in, but it is thin and pale and weak to look at, translucent enough that her innards are still visible. Her wings regain skin, but the feathers do not push through, leaving large swathes of bald skin.</p><p> </p><p>Looking at the newly formed bald patch on her wing makes Oliver want to vomit again, as he realises that this is why she has had similar patches for as long as he has known her. This is why she is so terrified of touch and why she trusts nobody. Because all of the people she has known here have let this be done to her and have helped Darhk to do it. And now Oliver is amongst the number of the former too. He let it happen again.</p><p> </p><p>“My Lord.” Darhk finally says, done with watching his victim heal and motioning for two of his people to stand and hold back the open flaps of skin on her chest to prevent them from drawing any closer together, “What was that ruckus about? Why did you need to enter so desperately?”</p><p> </p><p>Oliver is torn. He knows that he needs to end this before she can be hurt any more, but he can also see the two remaining men packing up the organs and blood that have been removed in this vivisection. He made an assumption once and chose to do nothing and it led to this. Now he must choose again between murdering everyone but his angel and Roy and attempting to abscond with her and his friends or to choose to maintain his cover once again.</p><p> </p><p>He makes his choice, knowing that she will detest him but that it should end up being better for her, “I heard the creature’s screeching and feared that… <em>it</em>… had escaped and was attacking you.”</p><p> </p><p>Darhk’s eyes glint mercilessly, “No. Those are just the noises that it makes to attempt to trick us into believing that it has feelings.” Sick. The man is sick. Anybody who could possibly pretend that she was not feeling every agonising moment of that has something severely wrong with them, anybody who could look at her lying there and believe that she is not still bearing the mental scars of her torture, even if the physical ones are fading, is insane.</p><p> </p><p>“I see that its mimicry has disturbed you.” Darhk states, causing for Oliver to try and regain his mask of apathy, “I assure you that is all that it is. Mimicry. It copies the behaviours of humans and animals to trick us into believing it is more than some poor, hollow extension of the Devil. It feels nothing, it is only pretending. Of course, it is harrowing to hear, the devil is imperfect but knows his craft. He has made a convincing creature, but the process bearable if you keep that knowledge in mind. And this needs doing, after all, if we are to discover how it is spreading this plague and if we wish to stop it.” Despicable.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver has never hated anybody so much as he hates Darhk. Not even the man who murdered his father. But slowly, he nods his false agreement, muscles twitching with a need to <em>do something</em>.</p><p> </p><p>“Regardless, we are finishing up, now.” Darhk informs him, “Just one more thing to do.” Oliver almost attacks and is only stopped when he sees that Darhk is holding not a knife but a vial of blood.</p><p>“What is that?” he asks.</p><p>“This?” Darhk is uncorking the vial and approaching the angel, “This, my Lord, is blood.” He explains, coming to a stop when he is standing over her open chest, “The blood of a plague victim, as a matter of fact.”</p><p> </p><p>And before Oliver can ask what Darhk would want with such a terrible thing, the Archbishop pours the vial’s contents directly into the angel’s open chest cavity. He barely suppresses a scream, eyes wide. She has the blood of the plague inside her. And Darhk’s assistants are replacing her skin, letting it stitch itself back together. She has the blood of the plague <em>locked inside her</em>.</p><p>
  <strong>*****END OF GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION AND ABUSE*****</strong>
</p><p>She may have miracle healing, but Oliver cannot see how one could heal from a disease. He is certain that he just witnessed Darhk murdering her.</p><p> </p><p>“All done.” Darhk says, as if he has just finished a pleasing meal and not the torture of a holy being. Someone good and pure and innocent. “If you could, my Lord, we do require it to heal and chaining it again has, in the past, led to the cuts reopening before they have a chance to fully do so. We usually require several holy men to carry it, but you understand that holy men touching something so evil as this is highly frowned upon, and you look like a strong young man so I would be grateful if you could carry it back to its cell.”</p><p> </p><p>“Of… of course.” Oliver finds himself stammering, still stunned at the latest atrocity he has witnessed the Archbishop commit.</p><p>“Excellent.” And with that, Darhk sweeps out of the room, his entourage in his wake and the only people left are Oliver, Roy and the angel. Oliver guesses that his inaction upon seeing her is something that has convinced Darhk of his loyalty. Or at least of his stupidity, in believing the unholy man’s claims.</p><p>*************************</p><p>As soon as he is sure that Darhk has gone, not even waiting to ensure that all footsteps have faded beyond hearing range, he rushes to his angel’s side, trying not to think about how she would probably be furious to hear him call her <em>his</em> angel now, after what has happened.</p><p> </p><p>“Honey?” he whispers, defaulting to the most recent pet name he had teased her with, his voice croaky and broken with his obvious devastation, “Angel, can you hear me” His hands hover over her body, wanting to draw her into a comforting embrace but fearing that she will find his touch more distressing than comforting at this point.</p><p> </p><p>As if to prove his fears, she uses what must be the final dregs of energy she has remaining to shift her body enough that she turns her back to him as much as she can within her restraints.</p><p>“Honey, <em>angel</em>.” He cries quietly, “Please. You have to believe- you have to understand.” He is almost incoherent, “If I had known… if I had even suspected that… that this is what they intended to do, you must know that I would never have let them do it. Please.” He begs for her understanding, even as he knows that he deserves none of it. She owes him nothing, and he owes her everything. He will never be able to make this up to her. <em>Never</em>. He deserves to feel this pain and more.</p><p> </p><p>“Please,” he repeats, “Even if you cannot believe me, please let me take you away from this place. Let me get you out of this room.” She makes no move to acknowledge him, but she does not deny him either, so he carefully reaches out, talking to her the whole while.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m just going to undo your restraints, okay?” he asks, receiving nothing in the way of a response. Diligent hands unbuckle the leather around her limbs, quick and efficient but also managing to avoid any contact with her skin for fear of her reaction. The last person to touch her skin then removed it from her body. It explains a lot about how she has always been so cautious about trading things with him, not wanting to make physical contact. He wants to respect that, as much as he can.</p><p> </p><p>Roy makes a move to aid him in unfastening her, but Oliver shakes his head and wordlessly orders him to guard the door. She barely even tolerates being around Oliver, a single person, right now, she will certainly not want anybody else near her. When she is finally undone, the full damage becomes clear. Her skin is still red and puffy and bruised in all the areas Darhk had attacked, the places where she had been tied raw and bleeding from her fight for her freedom. There are deep gouges, red and harsh where her skin has drawn back together, though he suspects that will heal more over time as the skin grows stronger. There is barely an inch of her that is undamaged, all of it bearing the marks of the violence put upon her during Darhk’s visit in some way. All of it mottled and bruised between the tapestry of wounds covering her body.</p><p> </p><p>A wave of hatred surges through Oliver. For Darhk, for himself, for everybody and anybody involved in this, and as he sees her small, naked body lying there he mourns. She is, of course, beautiful. As he had suspected from what her barely-there shift had hinted at, but he cannot focus on the beauty when all that he sees when he looks at her is that haunting image of her lying there, opened up.</p><p> </p><p>And looking at her, so timid and vulnerable, all of the fire drained from her, he wonders what Darhk is doing for the thousandth time, and what he could be doing behind the scenes. What could be happening. It makes his nausea resurface. He forces it down, focusing on the girl before him rather than the possibilities ahead.</p><p> </p><p>“Roy, are there any clothes in here for her?” he asks, even as he pulls his own cloak from his body and drapes it over her. As soon as the cloth hits her skin, she uses her newfound freedom of movement to shake it off, curling up in a ball on the table where she silently cries, the cloth only avoiding a dip in the puddle of blood below thanks to Oliver’s reflexes. Roy rummages around the little furniture that there is in the room, searching for something for her.</p><p> </p><p>“Honey,” Oliver says, heart clenching she sobs aloud at the name, “You’re going to get too cold; you need to put something on.” Roy returns, a bucket of water in one hand and a shift identical to the one they had cut from her in the other. Oliver tests the water. It is freezing. As much as he needs to clean the blood still covering her away, he refuses to cause her any more pain.</p><p> </p><p>“Roy, can you go upstairs and get Lyla to bring down some food and a bucket of warmed water, if possible?” Roy nods eagerly, rushing away, just grateful to be able to do something useful.</p><p> </p><p>“Okay, angel,” Oliver says once Roy is gone, “Okay, I’m just going to wrap you in my cloak and carry you out of here. I know… I know that you must hate me.” He barely manages not to let his sorrow break his voice, “And you won’t want me touching you, but if we use my cloak as a barrier you won’t have to feel my hands on your skin, and I really need to get you out of this room.” There is a rotting stench in it, the sickly-sweet flowers not enough to mask the scent of drying blood and disembowelled body.</p><p> </p><p>He tries to cover her with his cloak again, and this time she cries out as she shakes it off, unable to bear the feeling of his clothes, of his far-too-little, far-too-late kindness. His tears have started back in full force, soaking the collar of his clothing as they stream all the way down his neck, but he does not let her see. He knows that he needs to be strong for her, and that he has no right to be the one who needs comforting after what he has allowed her to go through.</p><p> </p><p>“Please,” he begs again, “I know you don’t want me touching you or any of my things touching you, but you need out of this place, and I’m your only option right now.” She curls into herself even tighter, putting an obvious strain on some of her still-forming skin, but this time she allows him to cover her body, just shuddering in response.</p><p> </p><p>Reaching out carefully and aiming to hook his arms under her wings and knees so that he may bridal carry her away, he slides his hands under the cloak and lifts her into his arms.</p><p> </p><p>The second that she is lifted into the air, she begins to cry in earnest, vocal, heart-breaking weeping that threatens to bring Oliver to his knees. Somehow, all at once, she snuggles her face into his chest as if seeking out comfort, and she tenses up so that as little of her it touching as little of him as possible, confusion in her every move.</p><p> </p><p>But it is enough, to have her in his arms, one wing wrapped around her body and the cloak and the other tucked under his arm, feeling exactly how light she is, even after a few weeks of decent meals. Knowing that she is so light because of the blood loss, and the theft of her organs as well as the starvation, but that he will keep her safe from now on. He will not let this happen to her ever again, no matter what. It is enough to keep him going, to walk her back to her cell even as he wishes that he could walk her back to his room and lay her on the comfortable bed in there.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>
  <b>SUMMARY OF TRIGGERING EVENTS: in this chapter, Felicity is forcibly dragged from her cell and to another room. She is treated as less than an animal by Darhk and repeatedly referred to as 'it'. In order to keep up appearances, Oliver and Roy are complicit and even assist with this and they then obey Darhk when he orders them to leave the room. Neither of them are happy about this and Oliver becomes very distressed as he waits, which eventually leads to him demanding entrance to the room when he hears Felicity scream. He sees Felicity lying naked on a table as Darhk vivisects her; the process is violent, invasive and agonising for Felicity, who is conscious and can feel what's happening to her. Oliver is horrified but Felicity's fear of him quickly returns when he tries to help after Darhk leaves because she associates him with dragging her there. Felicity survives the event because of an enhanced healing ability.</b>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>...I am so, so very sorry. I have no explanations other than Darhk is evil and clearly I am too. At least I gave you some fluff to start with? This is the worst that the physical torture gets in this fic, though there are references to it throughout many subsequent chapters (as there will be for most of the things that happen in posies) and a couple other instances where there is torture, though it is not described as graphically as in this chapter.</p><p>I hope that you're still with me next Saturday for chapter IV and I haven't scared you off. The title is daisy and it will begin to answer some questions &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. daisy</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>daisy : the flower of innocence, purity and hope; a symbol of loyal, unwavering love; the promise of a secret to never be told</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>One day I'll post at a reasonable hour and not right at the end of the day but today is not that day.</p><p>I just wanted to say thank you so much for all of the comments you've left on the last few chapters, especially on the last one. I know it was very intense and dark so thank you to anybody who has stuck around for this chapter, I promise it has a very different tone! I would also like to apologise for not having replied to any of the comments yet, I fully intend to and wish I had already because I am so very grateful but it has been a very long, difficult, stressful and busy few weeks so I haven't had the chance or the energy. This coming week should be better though so fingers crossed! But I do really appreciate every single comment, they make my day when that notification comes through and I get to read your kind words &lt;3</p><p>Also, a few people expressed concern last week that I'd just write all this darkness and finish it with unhappy things so I have updated the tags and I promise that will not happen! I'm no Arrow writer, I believe in happy endings and they're the only kind I write :D</p><p>Okay, I've said enough and I'm excited for you to read this chapter - things are revealed! So without further ado...</p><p> </p><p>  <b>TRIGGER WARNINGS: contemplated self-harm, attempted self-harm, attempted sexual assault (but nothing happens), assault and abduction.</b></p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>IV Daisy</strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>Felicity Megan Smoak was born in the summer of thirteen twenty-nine to an unmarried servant.</p><p> </p><p>Donna Smoak had been the maidservant of the wife of the Earl of Orchid Bay, not far from the Glades. The family was a kind and wealthy one, and Donna had quickly become invaluable to the Lady of the house, earning herself a permanent position and the ear of the Lady in spite of her lowly upbringing. It was whilst working there that Donna met Noah Kuttler, the double-entry bookkeeping specialist employed by the family for all of their accounting needs.</p><p> </p><p>Noah was a brilliant young man. The son of a well to do merchant and possessed of a mind far beyond any of his peers, he had been highly regarded in the town of Ivy Town, where the Earl’s home stood. In his spare time, he calculated complex mathematics and invented small gadgets, but was forced to bookkeep in order to make money. And he made plenty of money, living a comfortable existence from his own earnings and the small inheritance his father had left to his only son after passing.</p><p> </p><p>When he and Donna passed one another in the halls of the Hoffman Manor, sparks had flown. Noah had been instantly taken by the blonde beauty, and Donna by the intelligent, dashing young man. They had a torrid affair, and eventually Donna discovered that she was pregnant.</p><p> </p><p>Unfortunately for her, she was already six months into her pregnancy when she made the discovery and she and Noah knew that even if they were to marry, they would not be able to convince anybody that their child had just come along slightly early. Everybody would know that the young woman had engaged in an affair out of wedlock.</p><p> </p><p>Because of this, Donna took matters into her own hands and refused to marry Noah, not wanting to tarnish his name along with her own and knowing that he had only proposed out of duty and not love. Instead, she went to her Lady and confessed that she was with child, regretfully resigning herself to her fate but determined to make the fate of her child a better one than her own. Much to her surprise, the Lady did not turn her out onto the streets but made arrangements for Donna to go immediately into confinement so that she could have her child in secret and maintain her employment. As a Jewish woman living penniless in a country dominated by the Catholic Church, Donna had never experienced such kindness from anyone, let alone from a noble woman.</p><p> </p><p>It was not the first time that Lady Hoffman had shown such kindness to Donna Smoak. The older woman had once caught Donna in her prayers, and that was when Donna thought it was all over for her. She had been sure that she was to face expulsion from the country or, worse, to face the noose. But instead of alerting the authorities of her religion, Lady Hoffman assured Donna that she was safe in her home. It was the first time that anybody other than Donna’s own parents – who had birthed her a mere decade after going into hiding when the Edict of Expulsion came into law – had known of her faith, and she had never expected it to go so well.</p><p> </p><p>Lady Hoffman put Donna up in a tiny but private cottage within the woodlands of their lands. Daisies littered the private glade that the cottage was set in, the entire meadow dotted with yellow and white and even hints of pinkish purple amongst the green. It was close enough that she would be able to remain in the employ of the family, but far enough that she could start her own family away from prying eyes.</p><p> </p><p>And as July drew to a close, Donna birthed a beautiful baby girl and named her Felicity Smoak. The child took after her mother in every way physically, but it became very clear from exceedingly early on that she had her father’s mind. Noah adored the little girl beyond compare and would visit regularly to spend time with her and nurture her young mind. He gave her an education, something that many boys of her standing did not even receive but Felicity gobbled up knowledge, especially mathematics.</p><p> </p><p>Lady Hoffman was also taken with the young girl, as most who met her were. She ensured that Felicity had a steady supply of books straight from the family library to occupy her time as her mother did her duties and her father was away working. Lady Hoffman was as good as a grandmother to the little girl and loved to watch over her as her own children had all been girls and were raising their children far away in their husbands’ homes, so she was rarely able to see them.</p><p> </p><p>Felicity had a happy childhood, with freedoms that most members of her sex could not hope for. She had an entire wood to run through around her home. She climbed trees and dug holes and built small forts from sticks. She read books and did her sums, and she was happy, even if a little lonely as she lived so far from the other children of the town. Not that they would spend time with her if she were any closer. They all looked down on her because she had no father, but that never bothered her. She had all the friends she wanted within the pages of the novels she read. She had all the love that she needed from her beloved mother, and Lady Hoffman and her father whenever he came to visit.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Then, when she was seven, things began to change.</p><p> </p><p>Firstly, Noah’s visits became less frequent and more hurried. He had less patience for his daughter, he was snippy with Donna, and he rarely found the time to help Felicity with the latest mathematics she had discovered in one of her books. Felicity began to feel disheartened; she withdrew into herself and her studies and became less of the boisterous child she had once been and less receptive to her mother’s attempts to brighten her days.</p><p> </p><p>Then, one morning whilst her mother helped her to tighten the strings of her dress, they found two small, hard bumps on her back. Donna panicked, fearing that her child was afflicted with some severe malady and she picked the half-dressed Felicity up, rushing straight to the Hoffman house. Felicity was forced to lift her dress before Lady Hoffman to expose her back so that the older woman could inspect her. Not being a medical professional herself, the Lady had also panicked, fearing that she would lose the child who was so dear to her as so many women lost children they loved to illness.</p><p> </p><p>A doctor was called to the house, both of the maternal figures in young Felicity’s life nearly beside themselves with terror. She herself knew that something was wrong, she was not stupid, but she felt fine. She did wonder what the bumps were, but she had no concerns about them being something serious and felt that her mother and Lady Hoffman were rather overreacting. She wished that her father were there to calm them down. He would probably even know what the bumps were, he was always so smart, her father.</p><p> </p><p>The doctor arrived and was greeted by two frantic woman and a slightly frustrated young peasant girl with her head in a book. If he found that strange, he did not say so, he just opened up his bag and picked up the child, placing her on a table so that he could examine her. He did all of the usual checks but found nothing wrong with her general health and then he had her lie down on her front. This displeased Felicity as she felt that it was most unnecessary and lying down would mean that she would have to put her book – an interesting exploration of Pythagoras’ mathematical theorems – down.</p><p> </p><p>Nevertheless, she complied, knowing that her mother would be angry with her if she did not. Especially as Lady Hoffman was being so kind to go to the trouble of paying for a doctor for her. Humiliated, she allowed her mother to lift up her dress so that the doctor could have access to her back. He said nothing as he examined it, giving the three ladies no indication of what was happening to Felicity. Finally, he tugged her dress back down and allowed her to sit up, before sitting down with a grave look.</p><p> </p><p>For the first time since her mother discovered the lumps, Felicity felt concern. A doctor would have reassured them, if it had been something simple and common as Felicity had assumed, but this one was peering at her from a few feet away most peculiarly.</p><p> </p><p>He spoke, “In all of my years in medicine – and there have been many, as Lady Hoffman could tell you – I have never seen anything like this.” Donna gave a little wail, her mind going to the worst places, but otherwise kept herself together, “Your daughter… it would appear that she is growing bone.”</p><p>“B… bone?” Donna stammered.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes. It is most phenomenal, like I say. A first for me. But it is more than that, her back does not feel as it should. There is something in there, deeper down, like a socket for a joint!” he looked fascinated, excited at the medical marvel he had discovered, “It seems like an anomaly, just some randomised extraordinary bone growth that cannot be explained by a mere medical man such as myself, but it is even stranger, as this is growing symmetrically.” His eyes were bright with excitement as he looked around the room, as if expecting one of the women to understand why that would be interesting.</p><p> </p><p>“So,” Felicity piped up, aware that she was not supposed to advertise her understanding of the world but also aware that neither her mother nor Lady would ask the right questions, “It’s not a regular tumour? It’s an intelligent design?”</p><p> </p><p>“Exactly!” the doctor said, ecstatic, “You’re a clever young lady, aren’t you?” he turned to the adults, “It is not unheard of for bone to grow where it shouldn’t. Oncological growths can occasionally just be harmless bone, which is what it would seem your daughter is experiencing but this is far more! Her body is developing sockets much like her pelvis that will fit a bone, and the protrusions you are feeling are the bones that fit into them! Like a bird’s wing or some other such limb. Now, I would not expect it to grow all that much more, these things are rarely anything significant, but I do not think that it is anything for you to be concerned about, just far more unusual than these things ordinarily are.”</p><p> </p><p>“So I’m okay?” Felicity clarified.</p><p>“As far as I can tell, yes. This does not seem to be a <em>carcino</em> tumour, just an <em>onco</em>. You are likely to have it forever, but if it is not bothering you now, I don’t see why it should later on in life either and any form of surgery would only be more dangerous than the tumour itself is. I would just advise that you keep it hidden beneath your clothing as some people do not take kindly to these things.”</p><p>“So, I can go now?”</p><p>“Felicity! Manners!” Donna chided.</p><p>“I’m sorry, sir. I meant to say thank you very much for checking me up. May I ask if I could take my leave now?”</p><p> </p><p>Donna did not seem happy, but the doctor seemed delighted, “Of course, my dear. Just one more thing, have you been experiencing any unusual pains in the affected area?”</p><p>“No. Just normal growing pains.”</p><p>“Yes, I would imagine that you have been feeling a lot of growing pain there. If the pain ever becomes sharper or more intense in any way, if you feel anything unusual, I would ask that you come back to me so that I can make sure that the bone is not growing into any of your organs.”</p><p> </p><p>Donna gasped in horror at the thought, but Felicity, who had never felt a sharp pain in her back, just smiled at the kindly doctor and hopped from the table, letting muscle memory guide her to the library.</p><p> </p><p>That was the last time that Felicity ever saw a doctor.</p><p>*************************</p><p>The third thing was the most devastating of Felicity’s childhood, though not the most life altering.</p><p> </p><p>Unbeknownst to anybody else, Noah had been involved in several criminal organisations, most notably ones with a distaste for the nobility and monarchy, since before he had met Donna. His criminal activities finally caught up to him in the worst of ways. He owed a lot of money to a lot of people, so much that he was destitute and the regular stipend he had been sending to Donna for Felicity dried up just as his visits did.</p><p> </p><p>Donna discovered what he had been doing. She discovered that there were powerful men after the father of her child, and that they would do anything to get the money owed to them. She found out that they were threatening to oust him for treason. The only thing protecting Felicity was her anonymity. So few people knew that she existed, and even fewer knew that her father was Noah Kuttler, but these things had a way of getting out, and Donna believed that, especially if Noah continued to come and visit Felicity, his enemies would learn of his connection to them and they would hurt Felicity to get to him.</p><p> </p><p>It was not a risk that she was willing to take. It was not one that she would ever be willing to take, and it was then that she made her decision and cut Noah out of her life for good. She went to her employer to voice her fears and the Lady agreed with her maid. In no time, she had him banned from the property, Lady Hoffman found a new bookkeeper for her husband’s accounts, and she delivered information to her husband of Noah’s illicit dealings in order to get him agree to changing bookkeepers. It ensured that he would be forced to leave them alone as, should he ever come back, they would have all the evidence needed to have him arrested and permanently removed from their lives.</p><p> </p><p>None of this made its way to Felicity’s ears though. To her, she just knew that her father had stopped visiting her as often as he used to around the same time that the protrusions on her back became visible. She knew that those bones had continued to grow – far beyond what the doctor had ever predicted – until she had limbs as long as her forearms sticking out of her back and her parents and Lady Hoffman were being more secretive than ever about her existence. Lady Hoffman had expressed a fear that Felicity would be taken away should she ever be discovered with her extra limbs and had paid the doctor handsomely to keep his mouth shut about it.</p><p> </p><p>And what she knew more than anything was that, when her father visited for the first time in a month and had seen the large growths, he had been withdrawn and tense. He had talked to her mother for a long time with harsh words and, with barely a glance to Felicity, had left. She knew that was the last time that she ever saw her father, and she hated the bony growths on her back for taking her father from her. Because, from everything that she knew and everything that she had seen and heard, they were what was tearing her family apart, and they were what made her father lose any affection he still had for her so that he never returned.</p><p>*************************</p><p>The bones continued to grow, developing another joint and then another and then it started to widen, little offshoots. It was around then that Felicity began her research, trying to find out if anybody else had been through a similar experience before. Trying to find out what would happen if she just cut them off.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****CONTEMPLATED SELF-HARM*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>She found nothing. No mention of a human growing massive limbs on their back anywhere. But non-humans were a different matter. By the time Felicity was eight and the growths were nearly as long as her whole body, jointed and ever elongating, she realised what they were. Wings. She was growing wings. Like a bird, or like an angel. And the only thing that stopped her from taking a sharp instrument to her back and cutting was the curiosity that burned within her, urging her to wait and see what would come of the growth, how far it would go, whether she would truly develop full wings and how that would work on the human form.</p><p> </p><p>All the research she did on them came up with nothing, no mention of any winged human beyond the humanoid angels. And there was nothing that would actually help her. The only things she managed to learn were from her studies on birds and their behaviours. It taught her how to care for her wings, how to preen them and how to help her feathers along as they eventually came through. This was essential by the time she was ten years old and the massive limbs dwarfed her small form, when her first pinfeathers began to push through.</p><p> </p><p>Donna became increasingly paranoid. She restricted Felicity’s every move, keeping her so locked away that even her trips to visit Lady Hoffman were stopped. Felicity was no longer allowed up to the manor, the risk of another member of staff or Lord Hoffman or some visitor spotting her too great. She only saw the woman who was like her grandmother if the older woman was able to get away from her duties to steal into the woods and visit. It was not often that this happened.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****SELF-HARM*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>Felicity’s hatred for her wings grew as they did. Several times in her young life, her resolve to wait and see the process out wavered, once for long enough that she found herself with a knife pressing into the joint at her back, leaving a cut deep enough to scar for a lifetime. Her rational knowledge of surgery and the perils caused by open wounds on the body was all that stopped her from continuing. She wanted them gone. She had never minded being different from others, she had quite liked it in fact, but her wings did not simply make her weird and different, they made her alien. They forced her to hide away, living a half-life in the shadows, cut off from so many of the things that she loved.</p><p> </p><p>Being alone for so long had its benefits though. With little else to do besides read and learn, Felicity passed time running through the trees that surrounded her home and practising the one thing that her wings could do that she did not hate about them – flying. Not far from the tiny cottage she and her mother shared, there was a small meadow. Surrounded wholly by trees, and deep in the woodlands, it was completely sheltered from the outside world, the only ones who could see into it the birds who flew overhead and the critters who inhabited the forest.</p><p> </p><p>When she was flying, Felicity could not hate her wings, the freedom that taking to the air gave her almost made up for the freedom that they took from her in her day to day life. It was a slow learning process, figuring out how to master the use of those extra limbs. Infants have their parents to teach them to crawl and walk and write and do all manner of things with their legs and arms. Felicity had no such thing, there was nobody to teach her how to take off or how to correctly angle her feathers to catch a breeze other than her instincts. There was nobody to tell her when her wings would be long enough to sustain her flight or how long they would be able to bear her weight upon the wind. Because of this, she took many a fall, especially in the early days, and those falls from thirty foot and more up in the air were what taught Felicity that her wings were not the only thing different about her.</p><p> </p><p>She had scrapes, bruises and cuts. She fell so hard one time that it shattered the bones in her leg, and most painfully, she had fallen onto an exposed branch and impaled herself through the abdomen once. Donna Smoak never found out about a single one of the injuries that Felicity accumulated when flying. Every one of them would heal before she made it home. At least enough that the bleeding would slow and she could hide the remaining evidence before her mother’s return from work at the manor. When she was younger, Felicity had just assumed that she never got sick or injured by some fluke of circumstance, but as she watched the gaping hole in her abdomen close up, she realised that she had been wrong. She did get ailments, they just healed up long before she noticed.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****END OF ALL SELF-HARM*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>At fourteen, another ability developed. It was on the day that marked seven years since Noah had left their lives for good that Felicity wandered in on her mother, curled up on the floor and weeping. It sent a jolt through Felicity, who had never realised that her father’s leaving them had affected her mother so much. Donna had always been so strong, and seemingly unfazed with Noah gone permanently. But in that moment, Felicity found herself overcome with a strange sort of sadness. She felt detached from it, like it had not come from within her but from some other source and could not work it out. She was sad, but she was also just confused. She was mournful, but she was also more concerned for her mother than anything else. The emotion did not feel like so much of an emotion, but more like the echo of one.</p><p> </p><p>Puzzled, she stood examining the feeling for too long, and Donna raised her head and caught her standing there. A wave of embarrassment crashed over Felicity, but it was not her own embarrassment, and then she felt the strange sensation almost cut off, as if the feelings had been supressed, buried down deep and far away so that she could no longer feel them. At the same time, Donna had shaken herself off and busied herself making their dinner.</p><p> </p><p>A thought came to Felicity, a crazy one but no more outlandish than a seven year old girl growing wings; what if she was feeling her mother’s emotions? What if she could sense others’ feelings? She said nothing, not wanting anybody to believe her insane, but tested it out at every opportunity from then on. She examined her mother, Lady Hoffman, even the squirrels who watched her fly and she came to the conclusion that, yes, she had been feeling her mother’s feelings. And that it was not just her mother she could do it to, but everybody. She had some sort of empathic ability.</p><p>*************************</p><p>When she was sixteen, she ran away from home. All that she wanted was to see the world beyond her home, the world she had only read about in books. She loved her mother dearly, but she could not survive another day cooped up like a prisoner. A bird in a gilded cage. So she ran – rather, she flew – taking to the skies to get as far away as possible. She was not stupid; she knew she had to be careful to not be seen. The wings were both almost six foot each by that point, and impossible to hide.</p><p> </p><p>Felicity knew that she never had and never would lead a normal life thanks to the circumstances of her birth and her anatomical defect, but she could feel that there was more out there for her. Something far beyond the confines of Orchid Bay was calling to her and she intended to meet that call.</p><p> </p><p>It did not last. Within a week, she was spotted. A group of men, travellers and criminals, passed by the river she had been bathing in, catching a glimpse of her bare shoulders above the water and the huge feathery mass attached to her. They gave chase immediately, and Felicity sprang from the water, pulling a shift over her head, feet pounding on the ground. Her wings were waterlogged and too heavy to take flight, but she attempted to boost her already impressive speed for a girl her size with powerful flaps behind her. It did not work.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****ASSAULT*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>Barefoot, the uneven ground was agony to her feet which, whilst they healed fast, were still very much able to feel pain. She could feel the malicious intentions of the man giving chase and had never needed anything more than to get away, but she was unused to being exposed to so many humans at once, and human emotions were far more complicated than animal ones. The feelings rushing at her from them were overwhelming and those, combined with the pain in her feet, were disorienting. Almost incapacitating. She took a wrong turn, she stumbled, she slowed. Rough, graceless hands grasped at her wings, pulling out several feathers as they did but they managed to get enough purchase to bring her skidding back onto the floor, surrounded.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****ATTEMPTED SEXUAL ASSAULT*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>They tied her up like she was an animal and slung her over a horse. She could feel them leering at her, several of them sending her their intense waves of lust that made her shudder in revulsion. But the leader had plans for her, and she knew that those plans were all that stood between her and the disgusting men who wanted to use her body without her permission. She also knew that it would not last, and that they would do what they wanted to her before she would be gone.</p><p> </p><p>She spent days like that, pushing down her own emotions by focusing on those of the men around her. Despite everything, she managed to make it a learning experience, and took the time to develop her empathic abilities so that she could handle feeling so many human feelings at once. Halfway through their journey to wherever she was being taken, she caught her opportunity. All of the men barring the two guards were asleep, and the two of them were reckless. They had been drinking and she could feel their anger rising as they talked to one another. She waited another minute, attempting to determine whether their anger was directed at one another or at somebody else. Her heart thumped with dread when she realised it was directed at the leader for stopping them from using her. It fell to the pits of her stomach when she felt their intentions, their resolve, and saw them rise to their feet and begin stumbling in a drunken stupor in her direction.</p><p> </p><p>Felicity knew that she had to act fast or else. Catching a lucky break, she felt that the man closest to her was in the deepest part of his sleep, completely oblivious to the world around him. She took her chance, stealing a knife from the sleeping man and using it to cut herself free. The process was not easy, not with the way that she had been hobbled, but she finally felt the knife slice free from the final rope – and embed itself in nearby flesh. Looking up, horror choking her throat, she saw the two guards leering down on her, closer than she had noticed. She followed her blade, seeing that it was sticking out of one of their necks, blood already flowing freely.</p><p> </p><p>Swallowing back bile, she began to scramble back and away from the angry second man, who was scowling and reaching his grubby fingers out to her, more determined to hurt and humiliate her than ever, “You bit-,” his fingers slid around her calf, only to be forced back and she let out a powerful kick, catching him in the nose. His yowl of pain as bone broke beneath her foot was loud, loud enough that the rest of the men began to stir. Felicity’s window of opportunity receding. Wasting no more time, she thrashed once more, foot making contact with muscle again and eliciting another groan of pain but sending him stumbling back far enough that she could scramble to her feet.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****END OF ASSAULT AND ATTEMPTED SEXUAL ASSAULT*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>She stole into the night, careful to keep her movements silent and swift. She could feel the other men groggily awakening and knew that she had just seconds before they would become alert enough to notice her escape and begin their pursuit. She doubled her speed, working her lungs to their impressive capacity, designed for high-altitude environments, working her legs faster than she had ever pushed them before and thanking her mother and Lady Hoffman for her wild upbringing, running and exercising in the forest. As soon as she was a safe distance away, she took to the skies, soaring high and free and feeling the faintest echoes of fury from her abductors as they found her missing and witnessed her escape, unable to do a thing to stop it.</p><p> </p><p>She had flown through all of her pain and exhaustion, making her way straight home and into the arms of her distraught mother, promising to never leave like that again. Part of her wanted to negotiate for more freedoms from her mother, but the other part was still rooted in the terror of the last few days, still feeling like the helpless girl sat there waiting to be sold or abused or killed. The second part of her won out, and her own fears kept her hidden for the next few years, quietly honing her abilities from the safety of her home. The experience did give her one thing, however, and that was an appreciation for her wings. For the first time, she found herself glad that she had them, and grateful to them for their use in her escape.</p><p> </p><p>That appreciation increased as the years passed, and as she started to understand how remarkable it was that they had grown. She allowed herself to be curious about them and all of the other oddities that she had. She began to care for her wings more thoroughly, always ensuring that they were in prime condition and she felt healthier than she had in years as a result. It made her start to wonder less about why she had to grow wings and scare her father off and more about why her father would have left just because his daughter was different.</p><p> </p><p>This line of thought eventually made its way into a conversation with her mother. When Felicity confessed the guilt that she had been feeling for over a decade about sending her father packing, and the self-hatred that she had because of that, especially regarding her wings, Donna collapsed in tears. The young mother had never considered that her daughter would ever assign the blame to herself and had only wanted to protect Felicity by telling her that her father left. She had believed that Felicity would blame her father for leaving, or Donna for making him leave, and learning that her child had spent the last twelve years hating herself was heart-breaking.</p><p> </p><p>Donna finally came clean to her nineteen year old daughter, confessing that Noah had been a criminal, and that she had feared for Felicity’s life. She told Felicity about how she had sent Noah away, and he had not returned since. Felicity was not even angry at Donna; she was a smart girl, and she understood the decision that her mother had made. Instead, she allowed herself to turn all of the anger and blame of her childhood onto her father.</p><p> </p><p>It was not an immediate solution. A dozen years of self-blame and of hating her wings for everything that they represented would not go away in a day, but it was a start. And it finally started to give her back the confidence that had been taken from her after everything that had happened in her younger years, particularly after the incident when she was sixteen.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Confidence once again rebuilding, she had started to venture out of the woods for the first time since her childhood. She never went far, just to paddle in the stream that separated the trees from the village, but it was far enough for her to meet somebody for the first time since she was seven and there was no hiding her budding wings any longer.</p><p> </p><p>Cooper Seldon had been one of the few children who had been nice to Felicity, the rare times she had seen the village children before she turned seven. He had grown into a handsome young man, a year older than Felicity herself, with a charming smile and a brilliant mind. He had the young Smoak woman entirely enamoured with him in no time at all. Much like Noah Kuttler had once upon a time with her mother. They met twice a week at the stream, and they would exchange information on what they had each been reading through the week, and what new things they had discovered. He told Felicity about how his father had died and left he and his mother destitute when he was ten, she told him about her father leaving. He beguiled her with stories about the world he wanted to one day see himself living in, and how she would have a place in it right beside him and she let him touch her wings.</p><p> </p><p>He was always fascinated with her wings. She could tell that they made him uncomfortable, especially when he saw her healing and the strength that they lent her, but he was incredibly interested in them. She mistook that for interest in her. She let herself get swept up with him, blinded by his pretty smile and honeyed words and imagining a future where she could be free to go wherever she wanted without fear of being seen. She missed the warning signs like his obsession with her abnormalities and his hatred of the king.</p><p> </p><p>She neglected to notice that he was a younger and somehow more extreme version of her father. Felicity had been alone for so long, and the only people other than her mother and Lady Hoffman who she had seen in years were the men who abducted her so when Cooper kept her secret and was kind to her, she let that blind her to everything else. And when he started getting angry with her, when she rejected his advances and he threw her to the floor, breaking her wing, and when he hit her for asking him to be more careful in who he spoke to of his hatred for the establishment, she told herself that she deserved it.</p><p> </p><p>Then the idiot got himself arrested for treason and sentenced to hang to death for his crimes. Donna had to physically restrain Felicity to stop her from flying to the execution and carrying him to safety. Donna had to pick up the pieces after everything, and make Felicity see how Cooper had been using her for her mind, and he only would have used her for her differences for as long as she stayed with him.</p><p>*************************</p><p>The year of her twenty second birthday, a little over a year after Cooper’s death, saw an important visitor coming to Ivy Town to meet Lord Hoffman. The entire household was aflutter, servants darting hither and thither as they scrambled to make the necessary preparations for the arrival.</p><p> </p><p>Felicity was under strict instructions to remain in her cottage and not to venture out beyond their fence enclosed garden, once again excluded from everything thanks to her ridiculous, feathery fifth and sixth limbs. Besides, she had something new to occupy herself with. She had started going on short excursions away from home for the first time since her disastrous attempt when she was sixteen. She was older and wiser, and knew how to keep herself hidden by then, and she would fly high above the clouds at night to travel to sights and settlements nearby. She could fly far faster than a horse could gallop and covered large amounts of ground in no time. In the dark of the night, she would explore as everybody else slept. She had seen waterfalls and huge forests and all manner of natural wonders, as well as the large cities nearby, though she never stopped in the cities. She visited Castleton and saw the home of the late Duke of Starling, even catching a glimpse of the young Lady Thea once.</p><p> </p><p>And most importantly, she learnt of the plague. And in that, she had something new to research. She had a new pastime.</p><p> </p><p>Donna Smoak was extremely busy for the entire week that Lord Hoffman was entertaining, and she barely had a chance to come home and sleep, but Felicity did not mind. She was used to being alone. She just wished that she could do something herself to help her mother earn money, she hated being a drain especially since she had become a grown woman. But it was not like she could do any of the small gardening jobs that Lady Hoffman sometimes gave her when there were people roaming the grounds who did not know about her.</p><p> </p><p>Instead, she did her research, and she did her studies. She had become extremely well informed on a large number of topics during her life, but mathematics and science were always her favourites.</p><p> </p><p>It was a normal day for her, to go to the meadow where she had first learnt to fly and observe the forest animals – always so calm and curious in her presence – in their natural environment, to look up at the sky and study the stars and to wonder what was up there. She would sit on the grass and tinker with something, trying to calculate the mechanics of some theoretical machine. Impossible with modern technology, but maybe not one day. And when that ceased to be as interesting as it had, she would weave crowns from chains of the daisies that filled the forest and wait for her young fox friend to make himself known, unfailingly coming closer to inspect her daisies and settle himself down in the warmth of her feathers as she fed him scraps from the household.</p><p> </p><p>The woods were peaceful, and that meadow was her safe place to go and let her mind run wild. But, during the visit to the Hoffman household, whilst sitting alone and staring at the emerging stars, her peace was disturbed.</p><p> </p><p>“Now who might you be?” Came a voice far on the opposite end of the clearing.</p><p>Panic surged in Felicity, and she peddled backwards, trying to keep her wings hidden behind her as she hid herself in the shade of the trees. “I’m nobody.” She insisted, “Just the daughter of one of the servants at the manor.” Half hidden behind a tree, she tried to identify who was talking to her, “And you, sir?”</p><p> </p><p>“Who I am is not important.” The man replied, “I’m far more interested in you, but I suppose that you may call me Damien.”</p><p>“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Damien.” Felicity curtseyed a little, showing respect as she did not know the man’s rank nor title but she knew to assume it was higher than hers in order to avoid causing offence, “Are you visiting Lord and Lady Hoffman with the Archbishop?”</p><p>“Yes, you could say that.” He replied mysteriously.</p><p> </p><p>A distinct wave of discomfort passed over Felicity, the hair on her neck raising in a clear warning of danger. There was something… <em>off</em> about the man. Something dangerous, and Felicity wanted nothing more than to run back home and bar the doors, but she also somehow knew that turning her back on him would be an incredibly bad idea. Instead, she just leant back behind the tree, drawing it in front of her for some measure of protection and hoping that the darkness would be enough to hide her gleaming white wings.</p><p> </p><p>From her position, she attempted to reach out and gauge the man’s emotions, but instead met with cold, hard blankness. She panicked, it felt like there was nothing inside the man, no feelings whatsoever. He was a drain for emotion, a black hole in the midst of the lively buzz of the forest and she was terrified by it.</p><p> </p><p>“Are you lost?” she asked, trying to hint that he had outstayed his welcome in her life.</p><p>“Oh, no. I was just out here looking for something.” Darhk said pleasantly. Too pleasantly. It sounded false. Felicity felt like she had been stripped of a fundamental sense as she continued to push against the blank barrier, the feeling of it making her dizzy and nauseous but she could not tell whether he was lying or not. No matter how hard she tried, she could not get a sense from him at all, no indication of how truthful he was being anywhere to be found. Though she did not need her empathy to know that he had some sinister agenda. To know that whatever was happening could not be good.</p><p> </p><p>“What were you looking for?” she asked, “Maybe I can help you find it.” She thought that maybe if she helped him, he would go away.</p><p>“I already did.” Still that horribly pleasant tone.</p><p>“Oh, okay.” She frowned, muscles twitching with the need to run, “Are you just heading back to the manor then?”</p><p>“No, I think that I’ll stay here with you for a while.”</p><p> </p><p>“Okay.” She squeaked, spine stiffening, she began to take tentative steps backwards, “Well, I was actually just about to head home so I think that I’ll-”</p><p>“I know somebody who has been very excited to see you, Felicity.”</p><p> </p><p>She froze. Damien had a chilling grin on his face as he looked at her.</p><p> </p><p>“H-how do you k-know m-my name?” Felicity stammered.</p><p>“I met someone, not too long ago. I was to give him a final blessing, but he and I got to talking and he told me all sorts of interesting things about you. An angel girl who lived in the woods, with red and black on her wings and a mortal Jew for a mother.” He looked disgusted. Felicity was terrified. “And I thought that he was lying, but then he showed me the most magnificent feather – like no bird I had ever seen – and I just had to meet you.”</p><p> </p><p>Who was it? Who knew of Felicity’s existence who would have told him? Her father? No – he had never seen her wings in feather, there was no way. But she could think of nobody else.</p><p> </p><p>“And in exchange for the information he gave me, and for his aid, I ensured that the man would be freed.” <em>Freed. </em>“And I brought him along to see you again.”</p><p> </p><p>Another figure stepped out from the darkness behind Damien, tall and dark haired – “Cooper.” Felicity breathed, betrayal a knife to her heart. “Cooper? You’re alive? You let me think you were dead! I mourned you!” she cried, the memories of how he had made her feel resurfacing for the first time in months. She wanted to get away, she wanted to run and hug him, she wanted her mother, she wanted-</p><p> </p><p>“Hello, Felicity.” He said, his voice colder and more formal than she had ever heard it. “It’s good to see you again.” It was not. Not for her.</p><p>“What are you doing here? Why did you tell somebody about me?” she sniffled, but her voice stayed strong, “What do you want?”</p><p>“Archbishop Darhk has some things he wants to find out from you.” Cooper replied.</p><p> </p><p>Felicity’s eyes darted between the two men, “You’re the Archbishop.” She stated, eyes on Darhk, “And you’re not here to see Lord and Lady Hoffman. You’re here for me.”</p><p>Darhk looked delighted, “Oh!” he clapped Cooper on the back, “She’s as smart as you told me! Wonderful. Yes, Miss Smoak. I am here for you. You see, I am most curious about what makes you… tick, and how that might be beneficial to the world. I want to find out why God would put you on this Earth, you see.”</p><p> </p><p>Lie. Felicity did not need her powers to know that. He could not care less about God, he only cared for power and she was a vessel for that. Felicity did not wait for one more second, she could feel that she was in grave danger if she stuck around. She spun on her heel and started to sprint into the forest, needing to get away – to get to safety – because she knew that Darhk wanted nothing good from her. She knew that she must stop him from getting a hold on her. If not for herself then for everyone else.</p><p> </p><p>Instinctively, she sprinted homewards, mind only on the safest place for her to be, and body instinctively interpreting that as home. She managed to evade capture the entire way back, neither Cooper nor Darhk any match for her speed. She was exhausted by the time she saw her little home just ahead, not used to running so fast for so long, and she wanted to take flight and escape, but she was afraid that Cooper would have thought of the possibility and would have some way of stopping her. She could not risk flying until she was sure that she was out of sight.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****ASSAULT AND ABDUCTION*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>Just when she thought that she was safe, her fingers brushing against her door, something slammed into her from behind. She screeched, her cry echoing through the forest, terrible and fierce and she started to fight back. Her elbow made contact with something, hard – a face – her fingernails dug into skin, gouging into it and making a mess of the flesh. She felt her legs fighting against two much larger ones as they tried to pin her down, the body heavy on top of her and bending her wings at painful angles as they crushed her into the earth.</p><p> </p><p>She kept fighting, determined to escape, and heard more footsteps breaking through the trees. “Help!” she screamed, hoping beyond hope that they were Lord Hoffman’s soldiers, “Help!”</p><p> </p><p>Nobody helped her. Instead, she found herself surrounded by harsh looking members of the clergy, each one bending next to her scrapping body and taking one of her limbs in hand. They pinned her to the floor, taking her ability to move anything other than her head away, but still she fought, desperately trying to shake one of their holds. If she could shake one free, she might have been able to fight them all off and fly away. But it did not work, she fought for longer than she could say, hysteria setting in as time went on, until she had nothing left in her and her movements grew feeble.</p><p> </p><p>Once her fight was gone and she was just lying on the ground, trapped in a bed of bloody, reddened daisies and wailing like an injured animal, they wrapped her up and tied her down. She could not move an inch below the neck, everything tightly secured in her bindings. The chains around her, she noticed, had been specially designed for somebody like her, somebody with wings. There was no escape. She looked around her and saw Cooper and Darhk standing in her garden, the latter looking disgustingly happy with himself.</p><p> </p><p>She shot a look of hatred at them both, ignoring the slight grimace on Cooper’s face. He had no right. None.</p><p> </p><p>“So much fight!” Darhk exclaimed, “So fierce and strong. Yes, we’re going to have a lot of fun with you.” She wanted to crawl out of her own skin, “A lot of fun indeed. We’re going to find out what’s happening inside.” He told her, “We’re going to see how you became like this. A disgusting bird.” Felicity flinched; nobody had ever talked aloud in her presence about her differences so negatively before but hearing her own childhood thoughts echoed back to her was jarring. Her whimpers stopped, tears dripping from her chin silently.</p><p> </p><p>“Felicity?” <em>No. Please, no.</em> Felicity looked to the side, eyes wide. Donna. Her mother was right there.</p><p>“RUN!” Felicity yelled, her fight coming back with a vengeance as she ripped against her chains, “Run, please run!” she managed to squirm enough that the men holding her lost their grip, sending her crashing to the ground, still fighting. She saw her mother look down at her, that protective motherly instinct rising, and she knew that all hope was lost.</p><p> </p><p>Donna did run, but not away. Instead, she charged straight at Darhk. “What are you doing?” the woman shrieked, running past half a dozen shocked priests, “What are you doing to my daughter?” Darhk did not look bothered by the frenzied woman barrelling towards him, only interested.</p><p> </p><p>Just as Donna got level with Darhk, she was grabbed from both sides by his men, and held aloft, legs kicking wildly.</p><p>“You’re the mother?” he asked with mild interest.</p><p>“Let her go!” was Donna’s only response.</p><p>Darhk looked disappointed at her lack of cooperation, “Very well,” he said, turning from the frightened mother, his interest in her gone. Ignoring Donna’s continued yells and Felicity’s desperate cries for them to leave her mother alone, he addressed his men, “Place the creature in the carriage and make sure that it stays quiet. Get rid of the mother.”</p><p> </p><p>“No!” Felicity managed to scream, right before a fist clouded her vision, hitting her square in the jaw. She went woozy, losing consciousness. Just before her mind went blank, she saw her mother’s terrified face as one of the men holding her muffled her with his hand, and they carried her away.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>
  <b>SUMMARY OF TRIGGERING EVENTS: Felicity has some negative thoughts about herself which are specifically targeted towards her wings and she contemplates attempting to cut them off multiple times, including a time in which she presses a knife to them and cuts herself in the process, but she stops before permanent damage is done. She also encounters a group of violent men at one point who chase after her with the intention of capturing her and raping her themselves before selling her off. They do capture her but she escapes before anything happens. At the end of the chapter, Darhk and his men find her and chase her down, violently attacking her and Donna and pinning her to the ground, eventually knocking her unconscious and abducting her. I have signposted all of these events within the text.</b>
</p><p> </p><p>So... that's some of Felicity's backstory. I know I said the tone is different in this chapter and then I wrote angst and dark stuff again but I wrote it in a different setting! I can't help it if the story wants to end on a cliffhanger ;D I hope you enjoyed this little break from Slabside even though I know a lot of you were wanting to see the aftermath of chapter III. We'll be getting back to that next chapter; it's called chamomile See you next week!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. chamomile</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>chamomile : calmness, soothing; the chamomile flower brings comfort and reassurance; offering energy in adversity</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>LOOK AT ME I FINALLY GOT TIME TO ANSWER YOUR WONDERFUL COMMENTS! And I feel like now is a good time to say I love everyone who is reading this and leaving comments and kudos, I can't really describe how it feels and how much it means to me &lt;3 thank you.</p><p>Okay so prepare yourselves for a lot of feels and almost pure hurt/comfort for 10k words.</p><p>I messed around with this chapter a lot whilst I was editing so I’m sorry for any mistakes 😬</p><p> </p><p>  <b>TRIGGER WARNINGS: mention of suspected sexual assault (no sexual assault), discussion of torture, torture fallout, PTSD, confused feelings.</b></p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>V Chamomile</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>Lyla and Roy are already waiting for him when he reaches the cell block, the scrap of clothing they had found for her still in Roy’s hand, and a bucket of steaming water in Lyla’s. The woman looks horrified when she sees Oliver and the angel, both still covered in her blood, mingling with their tears and leaving a bloody trail behind them. Her still bearing the marks of her torture, though he has done his best to push the flaps of her skin back together. But Lyla has never been one to let her emotions get the better of her, and she instructs Roy to make a space on the floor in the aisle between the cells comfortable enough that Oliver may lay his angel down.</p><p> </p><p>Roy does so, using their own clothes to construct a small bed, just large enough for the petite angel, barely less malnourished than the day they arrived and looking smaller than ever as blood loss turns her skin sallow and sinks hollows into her cheeks and eyes. As he fusses over the fabric, Oliver simply stands with her in his arms, unmoving, shock seeping into his bones and images of her playing incessantly behind his eyelids. When Roy is done, Lyla gets him to place her down on the floor and kneels with him as she tells he and Roy to walk away and avert their eyes so that she can clean and care for the younger woman. But as Oliver goes to draw away from her, willing to leave so that she may maintain some façade of her modesty now, as that choice had been taken from her earlier, she cries out, hands grabbing at him to hold his arm close to her.</p><p> </p><p>Shocked, Oliver freezes, allowing her to slide her tiny hand into his, where it is completely engulfed and then she turns away from him, crying into the clothing on the floor beneath her. “It’s okay.” Oliver reassures her, “Lyla’s just going to clean you up. She will not hurt you. I promise, she wouldn’t hurt you any more than I would.” It does not seem to help, only increasing her hysteria and he winces at his choice of words. What comfort would that offer her? He vowed to not hurt her once before and told her that he would be her protector and then stood by and allowed… <em>that</em> to happen to her.</p><p> </p><p>Nonetheless, he cannot deny how she is grasping at him, even as she cannot meet his eyes and violent sobs wrack her body. “If you want me to stay, though, I will.” he offers, and whilst she does continue to cry, her hand tightens around his and he takes that as a request for him to stay. For the first time in hours, Oliver’s heart leaps for joy, hope that she might one day forgive him filling him. If she is willing to forgive him, he will not stop her, even if he does not think himself worthy of that forgiveness. He is powerless but to need her forgiveness. Her approval. Her l-</p><p> </p><p>Checking with Lyla that he can stay, she motions for him to keep his eyes on his angel’s face and nowhere else and he nods in agreement. He ignores what Lyla is doing, and instead watches as fear flickers across his angel’s face, as she flinches each time Lyla comes into contact with her during the cleaning process. Unable to just sit there doing nothing as she looks so frightened, he reaches out a hand, intending to cup her face soothingly and get her to look at him so that he can distract her. Instead, the second that his fingertips make contact with her skin, she screams, yanking her body backwards and away from him all the while tightening her grip on his hand and dragging it with her.</p><p> </p><p>“Oliver.” Lyla hisses, reprimanding.</p><p>“I’m sorry.” He says frantically, ignoring Lyla and focusing on the angel, “I’m so sorry. I just wanted to comfort you. I am so sorry; I won’t do it again. I’ll never touch you without your permission, I swear.” He is so focused on his angel, and the distrustful way that she allows herself to settle back into the nest of clothing, never taking her eyes from him as if expecting him to break his promise, that he does not notice Lyla growing still at his words.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****MENTION OF POTENTIAL SEXUAL ASSAULT*****</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>The younger woman does though, and she looks at Lyla expectantly, questioning why Lyla is not cleaning her anymore with her eyes. Oliver looks over to his friend where she sits, mouth agape, horror marring her expression.</p><p> </p><p>“Lyla?” he asks, frowning.</p><p>But much like he had ignored her in favour of his angel, she ignores him, “Did they touch you?” she asks the angel, voice hard and worried. Oliver wants to snap at her that <em>of course</em> they touched her, how else would they torture her? But then he catches up and realises what she is asking. His fear shoots down his spine, he wonders how he had not thought of this before. Had not considered that the woman he already cares so deeply for may have suffered horrors beyond even what he witnessed that night. Everything in him stills, his ruin awaiting in her answer.</p><p> </p><p>Blinking up at them, the winged woman frowns, not catching Lyla’s meaning, “Did they touch you… sexually?” she clarifies, and then, mind going down a similar path as Oliver’s, she says, “Did they violate you down here at all?” she gestures at the angel’s exposed lower half and Oliver once again feels sick at the thought. What if they have been violating her and she does not even realise that is what they have been doing?</p><p> </p><p>But her eyes widen in understanding and she jerkily shakes her head. Relief fills Oliver. Relief that she has not been raped, relief that she is present enough to understand what they are saying to her, relief that she still trusts Lyla enough to respond to her questioning. Involuntarily, the hand that is swallowing one of his angel’s squeezes tighter around it, earning him a reproachful look from the girl in question but she does not otherwise react. She just lies back again and lets Lyla finish cleaning her.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>*****END OF MENTION OF POTENTIAL SEXUAL ASSAULT*****</strong>
</p><p>*************************</p><p>When Lyla is done, his angel still does not stand from her comfy nest. She curls up inside it, still shivering and just lies there. Oliver takes the poor excuse for clothing that Darhk has been providing her and offers it to her, tempting her enough that she allows him to dress her. He also takes another layer off and wraps that around her for extra warmth, overjoyed when she lets it happen.</p><p> </p><p>Lyla starts to clean up around them, taking advantage of the access to cooling, but still warm, water to scrub at the cell in an attempt to make it slightly more comfortable and habitable for the angel. Roy remains on guard, though is still on the same side of the door as Lyla, Oliver and the angel, unable to take his eyes from the girl crumpled on the floor, her hand warming up between Oliver’s. He manages to coax her into lifting her head just enough to sip at some water that he holds to her mouth, relieved to see her replacing some fluids after how much she must have lost.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver cannot stop tracing the red welts on her skin, the evidence of Darhk’s cruelty. He is unable to stop looking at the way that they are shrinking, shallowing, healing. So fast that he can see it, just like when he watched the skin knit itself back together so that she no longer lay open. She somehow has healed as much as it would take any regular human days – weeks, even – to heal in the span of less than an hour. From the way that she uncomfortably shifts where she lies, and the occasional wince, he knows that her insides must still be in the earlier stages of the healing process, and the fact that the lines marking her are growing thinner and thinner with each passing moment confirms this. She must be replacing all that blood too, that must be how she survived losing so much. It must be how she lost so much to begin with, if her accelerated healing had been working to replace it even as she was tied to that table.</p><p> </p><p>The thought of blood has him shooting upright, the sharp movement tugging on her as the arm wrapped around his is yanked forwards, making her elicit a yelp. “Lyla!”</p><p>Lyla recognises his urgent tone and drops the rag she had been using to clean up a corner of the angel’s cell without hesitation, “What?”</p><p>“Lyla, Darhk!” Oliver begins, frantic, “He didn’t just… he didn’t just <em>torture</em> her, he also put something inside of her.” Oliver’s eyes dart over to the girl in question, checking on her reaction to his words. She does not seem to be having one.</p><p>“What do you mean? What did he put inside her?” Lyla asks, scared.</p><p>“He… he said it was blood.” Lyla looks slightly relieved at this information, “He said that it was the blood of a plague victim.” At this, she gasps.</p><p> </p><p>“He put plague inflicted blood inside her?” she whispers, body leaning back slightly from where he and the angel are sat together. “Is she… is she infected then?”</p><p>Oliver blinks down at the unmoving girl, “I don’t know. Can you get infected from plague blood?”</p><p>“I have to assume you can. Once it gets inside somebody, it must be in their blood, too right?”</p><p>“Is she going to die?” Oliver can barely bring himself to ask the question, the thought that she could survive through everything that she has only to be killed slowly and painfully, left to rot in her cell, by one final cruel move from Darhk too much to bear.</p><p> </p><p>Lyla does not answer, she does not need to for Oliver to know her opinion. She just looks at Oliver and the angel beside him sympathetically, hoping beyond hope that she is wrong.</p><p>*************************</p><p>They lie there for the rest of the night. Oliver does not even leave when Lyla finishes cleaning and departs, nor does he go when Ray and Rory arrive so that they can take over the watch. He sends Roy away, with instructions to the younger man to take on both of their duties for the next day and stays on the floor of the cell block, relishing in the feeling of the woman in his arms even as he loathes himself for enjoying holding her, given the circumstances. And given that he knows she will resent him for taking advantage of her vulnerability to wrap his arms around her once she comes to her senses.</p><p> </p><p>In the moments that she is awake, she refuses to let anybody touch her, but she also refuses to let Oliver go. And even if she hates him, Oliver believes that he is bringing her some measure of comfort and he is willing to do whatever it takes to make her more comfortable, so he will stay until he no longer believes that is the case. He is determined to treasure this time that she has allowed him to feel her small hand in his, her small body tucked into his side, aware that once she regains some strength she is likely to regain the ferocity that he knows she has and he will get no such chance again.</p><p> </p><p>Once she is in her right mind, the dichotomy she is experiencing between wanting to take comfort from the man who has been her friend for the last few weeks and simultaneously hating that same man who let her tormenter take her and torture her in ways that most could not even imagine will vanish. She will realise that she never wants to see him again, and if that is her wish, he will grant it to her just as soon as he gets her free of this place.</p><p> </p><p>Ray reacts badly to the news about what has happened overnight. He has to leave the cells, and Oliver hears him vomiting on the other side of the door. Rory looks green himself but keeps his composure for long enough to offer Oliver and his angel some food. To his dismay, she refuses to eat, not even taking a bite after he gives her a long lecture on why she needs to regain her strength after her ordeal.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver refuses to eat too, hoping that she will have something to stop his fasting, but it does not work, and they just sit for a few hours in silence, the food wrapped up and awaiting them. Oliver’s mouth waters at the scent of the chicken but he still does not take any.</p><p> </p><p>At some point, she falls asleep. Something in Oliver’s chest – upon which her head has fallen – unclenches when she does, relaxing as she finally manages to get comfortable enough that she can truly rest. It means that she must be healed enough inside that exhaustion is winning out over pain, and that she still trusts him just enough to know that he will not take advantage of her exhaustion. It means that she is going to have a chance to recuperate a little more, without suffering through the conscious thoughts and memories that he now knows must plague her every day.</p><p> </p><p>She has been sleeping for a few hours when she starts to twitch, her movements becoming jerky and increasingly threatening to both her and to Oliver as the twitching becomes thrashing. She begins to moan, whimpers escaping between each spasm of her limbs, she looks like she is in pain. She looks like she is back on that table, in that room filled with the sickly stench of dying marigolds and coppery spilt blood, her entire body caving in around her front in an effort to hide herself from the air, to protect her vitals from the attackers her mind has conjured up.</p><p> </p><p>For the dozenth time in the hours since midnight, Oliver feels entirely helpless. He cannot do anything except watch as she relives her anguish, finding no safe haven from her ordeal even in sleep. He is frozen into inaction, torn between his need to help her, to do something – anything – to lessen her misery, but also aware that he swore to never touch her without permission. Aware that she will recoil from his touch once she awakens.</p><p> </p><p>In the end, it is she who makes the decision for him. Throughout her nightmare, she does not once let go of his hand, and as it goes on, he sees that she is clutching at him, her other hand joining the first to grasp along the sleeve of his clothing, pulling him down towards her. It may not be a conscious request, and it is not exactly permission, but she is subconsciously reaching out to him. She is begging for help as much as she can in her state, and Oliver is powerless but to grant her request.</p><p> </p><p>Gently, he reaches down to her with his free arm, careful of the patches of skin he knows are still new and not entirely strengthened even if they now barely look any different than the rest of her. He manages to wrap the arm around her waist awkwardly, forced to twist into a strange position as his other arm is still tightly in her grasp and he is wary of further damaging her wings. The arm in her grip he still uses as leverage, using it to raise her body slightly so that he can ensure he has her securely as he swiftly hoists her upper body up from the floor and drapes her over his lap, dodging her flailing limbs.</p><p> </p><p>He curls her up in his arms, her lower torso resting on his legs and her shoulders and head cradled in his arms. The effect is instantaneous, she responds to his touch by calming immediately, her body settling in his hold and slumping as deeply into his chest as physically possible. Her wings cease their fluttering and fold beneath her, one coiling around the two of them like a blanket and the other nestling between his body and hers.</p><p> </p><p>From this position, he can feel the joint where her wings attach to her body and is surprised to feel her shoulder blades shifting outwards under his fingertips. The width of her shoulders widens visibly, making room for the large appendages to settle, the bony humerus fits into her back so that it no longer sticks out, and her thorax is flat. Surprised, he works out that this is how she is able to so comfortably lie on her back. He had been wondering, sure that the extending appendage must make it uncomfortable, but she always seems perfectly content and now he knows that is thanks to her body being able to shape itself in order to allow it.</p><p> </p><p>As soon as she is in the position, she finds most comfortable, snuggled entirely into Oliver, the discontent on her face settles, the pain vanishing as she just relaxes in his hold. He fills with pride at the sight, at the thought that he and only he can comfort her after everything that she has been through.</p><p>***************************</p><p>When he is certain that she is deep in her slumber, he calls Ray into the cells.</p><p> </p><p>“Keep your voice down,” is the first thing that he says, his voice rumbling with the warning to his comrade, who is known for his ability to forget his surroundings and make a racket at an inappropriate time. The last thing that he wants is for the angel to wake up after the night she has had.</p><p> </p><p>Ray simply nods, proving that he can indeed keep quiet when he needs to, and looks down at the couple huddled together, something like envy and pity in his gaze.</p><p> </p><p>“Earlier today,” Oliver starts, “When Darhk had her, he poured blood from a plague victim into his body. Do you know what that might mean for her?”</p><p>Ray looks horrified, “Nothing good.” Is all that he says, but continues at Oliver’s glare, “I have never read about anything like that… it’s forbidden to so such things, you see. But I cannot imagine that pouring the blood of somebody infected with the Black Death is going to do any good for anybody. I would even speculate that it could…” Ray gulps, “That it could infect them. If I had to guess, I would say that Darhk has given her the plague.”</p><p> </p><p>Oliver feels chilled, his worst fears realised as Ray talks. For as much as Ray is trying to downplay the situation by making it clear that it is just speculation, Oliver knows exactly how smart the other man is. And he knows that Ray’s speculation has rarely ever been incorrect in the past.</p><p> </p><p>“And Oliver.” Ray continues, hesitant, “If you have been exposed to her since her infection, exposed to her blood and such, it is likely that you are also infected.” Oliver had expected that. He has been breathing the same air as her for hours now, there is no escaping it. And he likely has some of the plague blood on him anyway. He has so much blood on him. He knows that he is a dead man if Ray is correct.</p><p> </p><p>“Thank you, Ray.” Oliver dismisses.</p><p>“Oliv-”</p><p>“Ray.” Oliver’s voice is harsh and final, “Thank you for telling me. Now I need you to leave so that you don’t also get infected. And I need you to tell Lyla and Roy what you have told me, they have both been in close contact with her too.”</p><p>With a mournful nod of acknowledgement, Ray leaves the room.</p><p> </p><p>Once he is gone, Oliver looks back at the dying angel in his arms and startles when he sees her bright blue eyes staring up at him, unreadable.</p><p>“Oh!” he exclaims, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you!” she just blinks, “How… how much of that did you hear?” he asks, focusing on the conversation he has just had so that he does not overexcite himself with the knowledge that she is awake and still not struggling to escape from his arms. She just keeps staring at him, but Oliver somehow understands. She heard all of it.</p><p> </p><p>“So, you know that… <em>you know what Darhk has done to you</em>?” he croaks, overwhelmed with guilt, “What I <em>let</em> Darhk do to you.” He is haunted by that thought, barely aware that he has even mumbled it aloud to her. He starts to cry again, too distressed to care that he looks weak crying before her like this when she has been so strong through all of her own hardships. “I’m so sorry, angel.” He chokes out, lips moving over her hair, unconsciously holding her closer into him as he does so, “I’m so sorry. If I had known… if I had thought about it just a little more… I should never have tried to maintain my cover. I should have just stopped him, consequences be damned, rather than holding out and tricking myself into believing that it would not be so bad and that I would be able to stop it more permanently if I waited. I should have put you first and I should have shot an arrow through Darhk’s eye whilst I had the chance.”</p><p> </p><p>She flinches at each mention of Darhk’s name, but otherwise stays still in his arms.</p><p> </p><p>“I know… I know that what I did is unforgivable.” He whispers, “I know that you will never trust me again after I stood by and let that happen, but I need you to know that, for whatever precious time you have left, I will do my best to make you comfortable and happy. I won’t let that monster hurt you ever again, no matter what.” He looks her deep in the eyes, noticing that they are shiny with unshed tears as she looks back at him, still closed off, “I’m not asking you to like me or to trust me, but please just believe that I will keep you safe now, my sweet angel.”</p><p> </p><p>“Felicity.”</p><p>*************************</p><p>Oliver stills, disbelieving. She just… <em>did she just</em>?</p><p> </p><p>“My name is Felicity.” Her voice is like honey, warm and clear and beautiful. It is music to his ears, even if she is hoarse and croaky from the amount of screaming that has been wrenched from her throat through the night.</p><p>“Fe-li-ci-ty.” He hears himself saying, testing out the word on his tongue and finding that he adores it. It is perfect. “Felicity.” He repeats, tears turning from sorrow to joy, “Of course. Felicity. Happiness.” He laughs a little, “Happiness. It could be nothing else.” His heart skips several beats when he sees the hint of an indulgent smile at the corners of her lips at his words.</p><p> </p><p>The slight curve of her lips quickly turns downwards, though as her mind catches up with her surroundings and the events of the previous night, “You let them hurt me.” She whispers, “You let them take me, even after you promised to protect me.”</p><p>Oliver’s heart drops to his stomach. “I know.” He gulps, “And I’m not going to ask for your forgiveness, because I know I don’t deserve it, but I swear that, now I know what he is doing to you, I will never let it happen again.”</p><p> </p><p>Her eyes shine up at him, taking his measure, “I will never let them touch you again. Not now, and not even… not even after.” His throat closes up.</p><p>“I’m not going to die.” She states, “And neither are you.”</p><p>“Felicity-”</p><p>“No, I’ve listened to you for weeks! You listen to me now.” Weak as her voice is, there is a strength in her words that lets him know he had better shut his mouth and heed her words. He nods, letting her talk, he will let her do anything, “I’m not going to die, because I can’t. He has done this before… the plague doesn’t affect me. I’m immune.”</p><p>“You’re immune?” he gasps, “How?”</p><p>“I think…” she frowns, still sleepy, “I think that it is because of how I am, and what Darhk wants from me.”</p><p> </p><p>“How you are?” his fingers brush over the base of her wings where they connect to her back just above where he holds her.</p><p>“Yes, how I am.” She is deep in thought, “I wasn’t born with my wings. They started growing when I was seven.”</p><p>“You were born?” Oliver is shocked, “You’re not an angel, you were born to a human?”</p><p>“I don’t know what I am. I had a mother and a father and until I was seven, I was normal. And after that, these started to grow.” She gestures to the wings on her back, “And then I got my other abilities.”</p><p>“Other abilities?”</p><p> </p><p>Her eyes narrow, the thoughtfulness that had overtaken her vanishing in favour of a forced blankness. Her eyes sharpen, she cloudy sleep clearing from them as his words jolt her fully awake. She is closing off from him.</p><p>“I’m sorry.” He backpedals, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”</p><p>“I would like it if you would let go of me now, please.” She says, much to Oliver’s dismay.</p><p>Reluctantly, he grants her request, “Of course. I’m sorry.”</p><p> </p><p>She tugs the makeshift blankets that have been lying, forgotten, over to the other side of the aisle and sets herself up so that she is facing him, with her back leaning on her own cell bars. “I started to trust you.” She whispers, “You were so kind that I had started to believe that you were not just using me for your own gain like everybody else does, but the minute that it inconvenienced you to be kind to me, you stopped. The minute that you had to make a choice between your orders and helping me, you chose to abandon me.”</p><p> </p><p>And even though he knows that he failed her, even though he knows that he deserves nothing from her, he still cannot help himself, “Felicity, it wasn’t like that I-”</p><p>“No! I talk now.” She snarls, trembling with the effort that sitting upright and holding this conversation is taking from her, with the pain he has caused her. “You had no idea what Darhk was going to do to me, I believe that, but that also means that you had no idea whether he was about to murder me or worse and you still left him to do it. You still left me at his mercy, and I cannot, I will not forgive that. I can tolerate a lot, but I will not tolerate a lying man like you.”</p><p> </p><p>For as final as her words are, Oliver can see her heart breaking, much like his own is, “You make promises to me and yet you never keep them, and I was desperate enough for your kindness that I allowed you to fool me into believing you – when I swore to never blindly believe in a man again – and now I’ve paid the price for it. Now I have had to suffer through that… that <em>torture</em>, when you gave me hope that I would never have to again.” a small sob breaks her voice, “All the while knowing that the man I im- the man I had allowed myself to trust was just standing outside, not only allowing it to happen but standing guard to stop anything interfering whilst it did.”</p><p> </p><p>Oliver is broken. Hearing her hating him for everything he had feared she would hate him for is even harder than he had imagined, especially mere moments after, in the drowsy vulnerability of being freshly awake, she had told him her name and smiled at him and opened up to him. Thinking that his night spent holding her will be the last and only time that he got to do so is unbearable. He wishes that he had enjoyed it more, he wishes that it had been under any other circumstances, he wishes that it had never happened. Because how is he supposed to go on now that he knows what it feels like to hold her, when he knows that he will never be able to again?</p><p> </p><p>“I- I know that I do not deserve your forgiveness,” he chokes, “I understand that, and I will not try to force you to forgive me. But I need you to know that, had I had any indication that Darhk was capable of such monstrosities, I would never have left you in there. I was going to stop him, I swear, but I knew that I could only be so successful before we were overpowered and that would put the both of us and everybody else I care for in far worse a position than before.</p><p> </p><p>“I know that it is a poor excuse, and it does not exempt me from the part I played in your suffering, but I weighed up the possibilities, and I decided that acting in the short term would only lead to more trouble, but that if I waited, I could complete my mission and stop Darhk all at once and protect you from ever being hurt again. I know now that I weighed it up wrong. I am going to do everything in my power to make this right. I can never undo what has already been done, and I can never make it okay, but I can make your future better, and I intend to.”</p><p> </p><p>She bites her lip, eying him warily, “I can’t believe you.” Oliver feels as if she has just smashed him into little pieces as easily as if her were made of glass, and the little sob that escapes her lips as she continues only grinds him further into dust, “I can’t let myself believe you. Words can be attractive and, when spun the right way, they make a tangled web that is inescapable. You spin your words very prettily, Oliver, but all that you offer is words. You come down here with your kind smile and you bring along some extra food and sit in my company, but you do nothing else. Actions are far more important, and I have learnt from your actions exactly what I need to know. Trust is earnt, not bought with false promises and cleverly disguised lies. You made me forget that for a moment, and I started to fall for it. Now I remember, and I see that you have done nothing to earn my trust.”</p><p> </p><p>But something in what she says makes Oliver remember the hard object that still hangs close to his heart. “I never meant for that.” He says, “I never meant for the only thing that I gave you to be my word, and I certainly never intended to renege on my promises. I still do not. Not again. Never again. I may have failed in protecting you as I said I would, and I will regret that for the rest of my life, but I swear to you, I will spend the rest of my life and your life – for as long as you allow me to share your company – proving that I am not that man. And that I will not fail you like that again.</p><p> </p><p>“As for the other promises I have made you,” he slides his hand under the fabric covering his chest and pulls the little book out, “As for those promises… I am following through on them even as we speak, as I always intended to.”</p><p> </p><p>He lays the book on the floor between them, and allows it to naturally fall open, split perfectly in half. In between the pages, where they have been for the last few weeks, are the daffodils and herbs that he had first left, and then taken from her all those weeks ago, wrapped tightly in the same piece of twine that had held them then. Despite how little she trusts him in that moment, she cannot hide how her eyes light up at the sight of them, tears rising to the surface.</p><p> </p><p>She leans forwards, not hesitant in the slightest, none of her attention on Oliver, and her fingertips caress the dried white petals of a daffodil. Oliver, still close to the book and subsequently to her, finds the courage to reach forwards, “Here.” He says, sliding a finger under another page so that he can turn the book. Felicity gasps, the noise of one who believes that something precious to them is about to be taken away, and her hand does not move from atop of the little posy. It means that, when Oliver is bringing the pages back down to rest over her daffodils, his skin brushes against her own, the gentle, faint touch sending sparks through his hand and a shiver down his spine.</p><p> </p><p>He looks up at her, still reeling from the touch and inwardly celebrating that she has allowed it and is not scrambling back for the safety of her cell or the protection of her rage. Instead, she just meets his eyes, slightly frightened but mostly intrigued, something thrilling shining through from her mind. Oliver feels his skin horripilate.</p><p> </p><p>Rationale catches up with the racing part of her mind that has her leaning into him, and she withdraws. Oliver tries not to let his disappointment show but understands he fails. Her eyes no longer locked on his, she looks down to the page that he has opened and her mouth gapes slightly.</p><p> </p><p>“What is this?” she asks, frowning.</p><p>“These are chamomile flowers.” He explains, “From the herb. They have a wonderfully strong, soothing scent and they are supposed to lend calm and comfort and energy even in the face of adversity. I thought… when I pressed the posy, I had thought that I would press some of these for you too. I hoped that they would lend you a little strength and comfort in your captivity.”</p><p> </p><p>He hears a little sniffle, “I am sorry.” He says, “I didn’t mean to make you cry again.”</p><p>“No.” she sniffles, “It’s just… nobody has ever really done anything like this for me. Nobody has just given me something extra just because they thought it might be nice.” She looks back up at him, “You let a horrendous thing happen to me today.” His eyes close slightly, ashamed, “But perhaps it was unfair of me to call you a liar and an oath breaker. I just… after that, it is hard enough to think straight, and all that I could think was that you had promised to protect me and to bring me back the flowers and to never touch me without my consent and then I woke up and I was in agony and I had no flowers, and I was somehow in your arms without remembering how I got there.”</p><p> </p><p>“You had a nightmare.” He says, eager to explain his most recent transgression in the hopes of earning her understanding, “You had a nightmare and the only thing that seemed to be helping was my hand in yours, so I did what I could to soothe you. It felt like your sleep and recovery was more important than my promise, especially as I had already broken my earlier promise to protect you. I can’t exactly make you hate me any more than you already do.”</p><p>“I don’t hate you, Oliver.” She whispers, “I don’t trust you, but I don’t hate you. I- I am so confused,” she whimpers, her frustration and anger and a cacophony of other feelings bleeding into the sound, “I am so confused by all of this. I can fee- tell that you are not a bad man and that you have good intentions and that you mean me no harm but at the same time you just stood there and let that happen to me, you helped them drag me to that horrible place and left me to their devices.</p><p><br/>
“But I cannot help but remember that, whilst you may not have been there when things were hardest, you have still been nicer to me than anybody else has, and you did not have to do that. You did not have to clean the blood from my body or hold me to relieve my nightmares or anything, but you did. And yes, you said that you would not touch me, but I remember that I was already touching you, I remember that, in my agony and desperation, the feel of your hand around mine and your arm around my shoulders was the only thing that could bring me comfort. I know did just sleep better than I have in years, so I can forgive you for that, I want to forgive you for everything, but I just cannot.”</p><p> </p><p>Inhaling sharply, her breathing ragged, she looks up at him, arms wrapped tightly around her legs and wings tucked tightly around her body. The raw pain and conflict that he sees in her takes his own breath away, “I have trusted men before; I have been betrayed and hurt before and my trust has always been broken. I trusted you and you broke that trust in so many ways, even though you meant well. I can never forget what happened last night, and I do not know if I will ever be able to forgive your part in it and yet, even after all of that my heart still tells me to trust you. And that is the worst part of it, because I want to, but I should not let myself; I know that I should hate you, but I cannot find it in myself to do so.”</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t hate me?” he asks, emotional, only able to focus on those words and the hope that they offer.</p><p>“No.” she says, “I don’t think I could hate you even if I wanted to.”</p><p>“And you don’t want to hate me either?”</p><p>“No.” Oliver cannot stop the huge grin from spreading across his face in response, even as his tears continue to stream down his cheeks. Felicity just looks at him curiously, trying to work something out in that big, beautiful mind of hers.</p><p>*************************</p><p>Once he manages to get himself together enough to think straight, Oliver remembers what Felicity has just been through and immediately starts to badger her to eat and drink. She must still be in so much pain from everything and he cannot imagine how hungry and thirsty she is. She allows him to make her drink several cups of water, and then even lets him cajole her into taking some bites of the plain bread that he has. She confesses that she still feels nauseous and does will not be capable of eating or drinking much for a while, especially as her guts are still re-growing and incapable of containing as much as usual, but she seems to know that she needs the sustenance.</p><p> </p><p>When she has eaten all that she can stomach, Oliver tries to convince her to sleep again. Just their conversation and the acts of eating and drinking have her looking exhausted once again. He expects her to push back against the request, but she instead acquiesces, telling him that healing saps a lot of energy from her and sleep would be the best way to expedite the process. Before she settles down, she sits on her rags and twists so that she can reach her wings, beginning to preen them. Oliver is fascinated, she cares for them so diligently and methodically and when she is done, they look better than he has seen them ever before.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you do that often?” he asks.</p><p>“I should do them regularly,” she admits, “But since my incarceration I haven’t been as good about taking care of myself.”</p><p>Oliver swallows a lump in his throat at the reminder, “And what about the feathers?” she looks at him confusedly, “Well… it’s just that I noticed that they do not seem to grow back quite so quickly as… other things do.”</p><p> </p><p>“Oh,” she understands, “Well it’s the same with my hair too, that doesn’t grow back when it gets ripped out.” She says it so casually, but it makes a bolt of anger shoot through Oliver. That she talks about having her hair and feathers and everything else torn from her living body with such normality is horrifying. That should not be a normal thing for anybody.</p><p>“Why?” is all that he says.</p><p>“I think it’s because they’re things that grow normally anyway. They’re non-essential to my survival and they self-renew regularly without interference, so there is no need for my body to specifically focus on replacing them, it just lets them regrow at their normal rate.”</p><p>“That makes sense.” He goes quiet, letting her resume her grooming and trying to push back thoughts of what it would be like to do it for her. What her wings would feel like beneath his touch. He imagines that it would be wonderful. He also knows that, though she does not hate him and seems open to trying to rebuild some form of trust between the two of them, her allowing him the privilege of caring for her in such an intimate way is nothing but a dream.</p><p> </p><p>Finally finished, she busies herself with reorganising the threadbare rags from her cell with the thin garments that she has been lying on for the last few hours into a bed. Oliver does try to stay silent and let her get on with it, he really does, but he is powerlessly hopeful with her. He wants to take and take and take anything that she will give him of herself, and he finds himself asking, “Can I hold you? Whilst you sleep.”</p><p> </p><p>Opposite him, she freezes, not looking at him. “What… what do you mean?” she asks, voice low.</p><p>“Never mind.” He stammers, “Never mind, forget I said anything.”</p><p>“No, Oliver. Tell me.” She demands. He loves her voice, it seems that now that she has finally taken this step with him, she is a woman of many words and she is not afraid to use them.</p><p>Powerless but to give her whatever she asks for, he repeats, “I… I want to hold you again. And you slept so much better in my arms, so I just thought… I just thought we could try it again. I am sorry, it was silly of me to ask. You never even gave me permission to the first time; you’re definitely not going to want to-”</p><p> </p><p>“Oliver have you slept?” she interrupts, “When was the last time you slept?”</p><p>Oliver thinks about it, “Not that it’s important, but I got about three hours yesterday before my shift on the training yard.”</p><p>“Only three?”</p><p>“That’s fairly normal to me.”</p><p> </p><p>That seems to displease her greatly, and she scowls at him, “You didn’t sleep at all last night? Or earlier today?”</p><p>Oliver looks at her incredulously, “Of course I didn’t. Do you really think that I could sleep after <em>that</em>?” a lump in his throat chokes the end of the sentence.</p><p>“I had assumed that the exhaustion must have gotten to you at some point at least, I never thought that you’d go for two days almost on only three hours of sleep.”</p><p>“It wouldn’t be the first time.” He grunts, baffled as to why this is bothering her so much.</p><p> </p><p>But that does not seem to alleviate any of her concerns. If anything, his admission to having slept so little in the past makes her more disgruntled with him. “Okay.” She determines.</p><p>“Okay?” Oliver asks, having forgotten the original point of the conversation.</p><p>“Okay, you can hold me whilst I sleep.” Oliver lights up, thrilled more than even he realised he would be. “But,” he thinks that he should probably deflate a little, ‘but’s are rarely good in his world, “You can only hold me whilst I sleep if you get some sleep too.” She says bravely.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver just blinks at her for what must be several minutes, unable to wrap his head around her suggestion. “I- you want me to- what?”</p><p>“I want you to hold me whilst we both sleep.” She replies demurely. The way that she says it is too casual, like there is a lot riding on his answer for her but she does not want him to know how much, “Or I just want you to sit there and not touch me and wake me if I have a nightmare again.”</p><p> </p><p>Trying not to grow overexcited, Oliver asks one more time for clarification, “You want me to sleep next to you, with you in my arms?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p> </p><p>Oliver cannot agree fast enough, “Yes! Of course, I would love to- ah. I mean, I would really like to hold you and sleep with you. I mean, I want to do whatever will help you sleep most and I’m okay with sleeping too because Ray and Rory are right out there keeping an eye on things, so I don’t need to worry about-”</p><p>“Oliver?” she cuts him off, and he sees that she is already bedding down.</p><p>“Yes, of course.” He repeats, “Just give me a moment to check in with my men.” Quick as he can, Oliver scrambles to his feet and makes his way to the door, moving with the urgency of a man worrying that she is going to change her mind.</p><p> </p><p>He is surprised when he finds not Rory and Ray but Lyla and Roy. The younger man is sleeping on the ground, Lyla clearly having allowed him to get the rest that the events of the previous night had kept him from. She explains to him that Ray had caught her and explained the situation to her before she met back with John, and that she and Roy had immediately decided to take guard duty between them for the foreseeable future. Until they could be sure of whether or not they had the pestilence. Oliver nods his approval, distracted by the thought of her waiting inside. Without asking, Lyla ushers him back into the cell block once she has finished her update, noticing his lack of focus and already knowing where he is going to spend his night.</p><p> </p><p>The door shuts, and Oliver turns to see Felicity lying on the thin clothes, already trying to make herself comfortable and warm in the still-harsh conditions that are only worsened for her as she remains not quite fully healed. He takes a deep breath, trying not to look too deeply into the meaning behind the deal that she made with him and then strips off the heavier garments he is wearing, including several weapons.</p><p> </p><p>He is in just his trousers and a loose, thin tunic as he approaches her. She is already lying down, eyes shining up at him, and he is slow in his movements as he kneels besides her. He gently lowers his body until he is parallel with hers on the ground, and she says not a word, those big eyes just staring and full of some emotion that Oliver cannot identify. One of her hands reaches out to grab one of his and Oliver does not fail to notice that they are the same two hands that were connected for most of the day as she slept. Without saying a thing, she turns to lie on her opposite side, wings elegantly avoiding hitting him as they tuck into her body, folding warmly around her small frame.</p><p> </p><p>She gives a slight tug on the hand she is holding, drawing him into her and he just follows along with it, in awe that she is even allowing him to talk to her let alone <em>hold her as they sleep together</em>. Before he is fully aware of how close they have grown, her wings are sandwiched between her back and his chest, the feathery texture tickling at the exposed skin of his arms and neck in the most pleasing of ways.</p><p> </p><p>She settles like that, her back to his chest, her hips tucked enticingly into his own. Oliver finds himself squeezing his eyes shut painfully, consciously making an effort to ignore all sensations coming from below his waist, not wanting to scare her off with any untoward reactions to their proximity. But she is a uniquely beautiful woman, one for whom he cares a great amount and on top of that she also has the most exquisite wings. A man only has so much self-control, but Oliver’s is just about enough to keep him in check as he holds the almost naked woman, constantly reminding himself that she is still injured and vulnerable, probably in more pain that she is letting him see and quite likely still not fully in control of her decisions.</p><p> </p><p>His free arm – the one not wrapped around her – he places just next to her head, and she shifts a little so that she can lie her head on his bicep. He manages to not gasp in pleasure when she does, but he has never been in a situation so tense before. It is ridiculous, because nothing about what is happening is not perfectly innocent, but he has a woman lying in his arms. A gorgeous, wonderful woman who is small enough that she tucks tightly into him even with her wings in the way. He could wrap her entire body up in his, just as he had imagined.</p><p> </p><p>“Oliver, tell me more about Thea.” She whispers into the quiet room.</p><p>“Thea?” he asks.</p><p>“Yes, I want to know more about her and what it was like for the two of you growing up.” Oliver has been telling Felicity random stories about his baby sister over the last few weeks as he has sat with her. He tells her a lot of stories, but for some reason it would seem like the ones about Thea have stuck most.</p><p> </p><p>“Okay.” He says and then he launches into the story of how Thea had broken her arm when she was eight and he was eighteen thanks to an incident whilst horse riding. Felicity sighs contentedly, relaxing into him as he talks, and she says nothing. She just sits there and listens like she has so many times before.</p><p> </p><p>Felicity falls asleep quickly, her tiredness winning out in no time and then Oliver is left lying with his arms around a literal sleeping angel, tired but completely unable to sleep. This is something that he has been dreaming of, not that he would ever admit to it. But being in the situation forces him to acknowledge the feelings that he has been pushing back for weeks. It forces him to acknowledge the attraction that he has to her. She is like a magnet, drawing him in and he has no control over it but, even more frighteningly, Oliver does not think that he would stop it even if he had the power to. Even though he knows it will only end in his heart being broken when she tells him that she cannot trust him enough to let him in like that.</p><p> </p><p>He is in so deep already.</p><p> </p><p>He wonders what Thea would say. What she would think of the perfect woman Oliver has found. He thinks that they would get along, now that he can see some more of his angel’s personality in her talkative nature.</p><p> </p><p>As she sleeps in his arms, she unconsciously snuggles herself further into him, eliciting a contented sigh. Their somehow closer proximity brings his nose to the crown of her head and he cannot help but take a deep inhale of her scent, nuzzling her hair.</p><p> </p><p>“Felicity.” He repeats, quiet enough that it is just a breath, testing out her name again and finding that he loves it more and more each time he hears it.</p><p> </p><p>“Fe-li-ci-ty.”</p><p>*************************</p><p>Oliver is awakened by Lyla, who enters the cell block with a clang that startles him from his slumber. He must have fallen asleep at some point during his musings on the nature of his relationship with Felicity, and what he would like the nature of their relationship to become. The answer was startling. Far too intense. For Oliver, for his outlook on life, for how long he has known her, for the situation that they are in. It is intense, but he knows that his feelings are true.</p><p> </p><p>“Oliver?” she asks, startled to find him wrapped around Felicity like a vine. Because he is truly wrapped around her now. Whatever space he had maintained between them before falling asleep in some vain attempt to maintain a semblance of decorum is long gone. Their legs are entirely entwined, his arms are wrapped around her far more tightly than they had been, and she is completely ensconced in his embrace.</p><p> </p><p>He clears his throat, a faint blush rising on his cheeks at his friend finding him in such a position and tries to unwrap himself from her. His success is limited; she is unwilling to let him go. He gets far enough away that he can shift them so that he is sat up with her in his lap and can face his friend for a proper conversation.</p><p> </p><p>“Lyla, what time is it?” his voice is slightly rougher than usual from sleep, and Felicity snuggles closer into his chest as it vibrates.</p><p>“Morning.” Lyla says vaguely, “What is happening here?” she asks, never one to beat around the bush.</p><p>More aware thanks to some of the most restful and lengthy sleep he has had in a long time, he actually remembers to inform her of what had happened after Lyla left the day before. “She woke up and I managed to get her to drink some water and then to eat a little, though she did not eat much. She said that her… her <em>guts</em> were still too small and needed to grow some more before she could eat properly.” He shudders at the thought, repulsed by what Darhk has done to her. Lyla seems to feel the same if her own shudder is anything to go by. “She got tired very quickly, she said that it was the re-growing that was tiring her out, and she wanted to sleep again. Then she asked me to hold her and sleep next to her, after she found out that I hadn’t slept myself.”</p><p> </p><p>Lyla’s eyebrow is raised, but she says nothing. Then her face shifts into an expression of surprise, “Wait. Did you say… she <em>told</em> you things? <em>She spoke</em>?”</p><p>Oliver grins, adoringly stroking a finger along Felicity’s cheek and pushing back a lock of hair that has escaped, “Yes, she did.”</p><p>“What did she <em>say</em>?”</p><p>The grin slips away, “She said a lot.” He gulps, “A lot. Most of which was unpleasant, but I’m not going to betray her trust again, not without her permission.”</p><p> </p><p>He knows that Lyla respects that, and she sits back nodding. “Does she know about… about the <em>plague</em>?”</p><p>Oliver had almost forgotten about that, after everything, “She does. She’s not worried.”</p><p>“She’s not?”</p><p>“No. She said that her healing abilities extend beyond just flesh and blood and bone. She is immune.” He explains, “Apparently this is not the first time that Darhk has poisoned her with tainted blood.” Lyla looks almost as furious as Oliver had been at that news.</p><p>“Can she spread it?”</p><p>Oliver’s jaw clenched, “She did not seem to be worried about that possibility, but she did not explain why. I shall check when she is awake.”</p><p> </p><p>“And is she still healing?” the woman presses on.</p><p>Oliver angles Felicity’s body so that the places where she had been cut open are more visible, “Not a mark left. She just needs food and water and rest now.” The skin is, indeed, completely bare of any marking. It is a silky smooth as it had been the day before, no evidence of her torture left behind.</p><p>“Incredible.” Lyla whispers, eyes tracing over the unblemished skin, “Here are some more provisions. We managed to sneak some more blankets down, something a little more comfortable but we don’t want to bring too much, or it’ll raise suspicion.”</p><p> </p><p>Oliver nods his understanding and takes the bundles from Lyla, already unwrapping one so that he can lay it over Felicity’s highly exposed body to keep her warm. “Thank you.” He dismisses her friend, tucking the blanket in to ensure that there are no spots left where Felicity is exposed to the air in the room and any potential breezes.</p><p> </p><p>Lyla leaves, and Oliver just settles back, unable to sleep again now that he is awake. Felicity stirs not long after, mouth opening in an adorable yawn that only endears Oliver to her even more than before.</p><p>“Morning.” He greets her, watching as she recognises her now familiar position in his arms. What is less familiar is the blanket tucked around her, and he sees how she takes that in too.</p><p> </p><p>She frowns, “You wrapped a blanket around me?” she asks, looking a little upset.</p><p>Oliver panics, “Yes.” He admits, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep any boundaries, I didn’t realise that this would be one, Lyla just brought it down and I wanted to warm you up.”</p><p>Her chin wobbles, tears spring up and Oliver feels horrible but before he can launch himself into another ramble of apology, she speaks, “Why are you so kind to me?”</p><p> </p><p>That was not what he had been expecting her to say at all.</p><p> </p><p>“What?” he asks rudely, too taken aback to consider propriety.</p><p>“Why are you so kind to me?” she repeats, “You bring me all of these things to make me happy and you’re so considerate and you just… you just looked at me and thought I might be cold, so you wrapped me up. <em>Why</em>?” she cries.</p><p>“I- I just want you to be comfortable.” He stammers.</p><p>“But <em>why</em>?” she repeats, almost blubbering the words.</p><p> </p><p>“I… because you deserve it?” he says but he can tell that she still cannot wrap his head around the tiny, insignificant acts of kindness he has offered her. To his mind, he is barely doing anything. He should be doing so much more, but he sees that to hers, him bringing her food and flowers and blankets is <em>everything</em>. A terrible hatred fills him, his mind in a murderous rage as he longs for nothing more than to swing a blade into Darhk’s neck over and over again.</p><p> </p><p>How can Darhk have treated her like this? How can he have made her so touch starved and yet so fearful of touch? So self-loathing and also so in need of somebody to love her. To just be kind to her. How long has it been since somebody last treated her kindly before Oliver? How long since she has been told of her worth and how incredible she is?</p><p> </p><p>A woman like her should hear every day of her endless virtues. Her kindness, her intelligence, her beauty. Everything about her deserves praise and yet all she has received is hatred. Oliver longs to show Darhk what it is like to be a captive, beat into the dirt until you are desperate for somebody to just not stamp on you anymore. He wants to teach the Archbishop what pain is, and how much the human mind can bear before it goes mad. He wants Darhk to <em>know</em>.</p><p> </p><p>But instead of standing and focusing his anger on the architect of Felicity’s misery, he looks down at her, hurting, “You don’t deserve this.” He tells her, “You don’t deserve to be treated how he is treating you. You deserve to be treated like a queen, like the angel you are. You are remarkable, Felicity, and you deserve the whole world. Not this.”</p><p> </p><p>She gives a small sob, and he can tell that she is struggling to believe his words after so long of being told the opposite, but she allows him to draw her into him and tucks her face into his neck. Her tears wet his shirt, but he does not move, because he knows that she needs this moment. She needs to take in what he has said, and she needs the time to believe his words herself before anything else can happen.</p><p> </p><p>So, he just holds her there, comforting her as much as he can as he presses his lips to the crown of her head again. It is not a kiss, he is just holding himself there, nose against her hair, and that is how they stay until her stomach rumbles and Oliver remembers the food that Lyla had brought down.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>
  <b>SUMMARY OF TRIGGERING EVENTS: Lyla suspects that Darhk and/or his men may have raped Felicity, but she reassures them that she has not been touched in a sexual manner against her will - this part is signposted. Throughout the chapter, Felicity's torture is mentioned and discussed and the fallout of her emotions and mental state features heavily. She displays symptoms of PTSD from her trauma and has some very conflicted and confused feelings, especially regarding Oliver.</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Soooooo... that was nice right? RIGHT? It was definitely much nicer! I know it's not all sunshine and roses yet but it was never going to be after chapter III, but based on some of the comments I've had I feel like it was better than a lot of you were expecting? FELICITY TOLD HIM HER NAME AND THEY SPOKE AND SHE LET HIM HUG HER! I know some of you might feel that's a little soon after everything, but I tried to show how confused and conflicted she is here and there is more of an explanation for some of it that's gonna come eventually.</p><p>I'd love to hear your thoughts! I hope to see you next Saturday (maybe I'll post early for once? or maybe I'm just deluding myself) for chapter VI! I'm pretty sure it's called primrose.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'm on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/MagusLibera">@MagusLibera</a>.</p><p>Stay safe, healthy, wear a mask and keep that curve flat!</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>